Fracking Health Care: How to Safely De-medicalize America and Recover Trapped Value for Its People
Call it the trillions that time forgot. Shining fortresses filled with gold and teeming with human activity dot the American landscape. Within them, much is produced to benefit the nation. Overseers enjoy prestige and prosperity, and minions security and purpose. Outside their gates, society’s reverence is made tangible by regular custom and lavish tribute.
These fortresses are not feudal castles, grand cathedrals, or even great universities. They are emphatically not churning factories, although they are businesses. They are America’s hospitals and clinics—the industrial engines of U.S. health care.1 And most are both out of time and out of place.
Pushing $4 trillion annually, and employing millions of people in most communities in every state, health care represents one-sixth of the American economy. 2 Only the automobile industry in its heyday during the 1950s and 1960s rivaled modern health care’s centrality to peacetime domestic production and employment.3
In 2017, large economic sectors tend to share common features.4 Ownership is separated from control. Goods and capital move freely. Production is global and automated. Entry barriers have dropped. Products come assembled. Prices are low, as is inflation. Consumers matter. On the downside, domestic employment has slowed, and the rewards of production accrue mainly to senior executives and wealthy investors.5
