Relentless Health Value

I was really vexed the other day when I read on Twitter—First rule of thumb: Stay away from Twitter—but I read on Twitter someone bashing telehealth because, for many older Americans, going to the doctor is the only thing on their social calendar. Ummm, OK. So, we celebrate the idea of paying a cardiologist or a nephrologist or an orthopedic surgeon or some other specialist how much in FFS (fee-for-service) payments to be a paid friend for 7 minutes? So, we’re going to expect these expensive specialists to provide mental and behavioral health support when they have no particular mental health training, and, at the same time, we’re going to weirdly slam telehealth for not enabling this obviously failing and expensive model to continue. And I’ll tell you how I know it’s failing: We have an epidemic of loneliness in this country. So maybe, instead of this serpentine logic, we should instead actually directly address the epidemic of loneliness. Maybe we should directly address mental health and behavioral health.