A year ago I wrote a rather gloomy blog about US healthcare in which I compared their failure to tackle Covid, with their failure to eradicate human plague – the Black Death
The US is still the only developed country in the world to regularly record new cases of the Bubonic Plauge, which was eradicated in the UK and most of Europe a century ago.
At the time I wrote it I was pessimistically predicting the US excess mortality from Covid would be over 150,000. Rather optimistically I thought that Trump would lose, and I was right
Sadly Covid did become endemic in rural populations and the total excess deaths currently stand at over 600,000.
This week a 10 year girl in rural Southern Collarado died of the Black Death.
The crisis facing US healthcare is a lot worse than I thought. I still hope that Biden might be radical, not because that is his instinct but because he has few other options. The mess is so huge, that it demands radical solutions. US healthcare is at a turning point, without radical changes it cannot go on.
Whether Biden can force though these changes with a log jammed Senate might be a different matter.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/26/us-monkeypox-exposure-health-officials