I personally at 37 years old would be willing to give up SS benefits if I didn't have to worry about paying for Healthcare for the rest of my life. I can save for retirement on my own and not having to pay for healthcare after retirement is much better than a meager SS check. Most seniors spend it on Healthcare anyway so it's robbing Peter to pay Paul.
That silence your question was met with is because you apparently asked a room full of the people for whom the current healthcare system is working just fine to give something up for the benefit of healthcare workers and patients. What did you expect to happen? Why does their silence lead you to suggest that everyone else has to also give something up rather than put their greed and selfishness on stark display?
Eliminate the profit motive of for profit health insurance and administrative companies and you solve an enormous cause of the problems. It’s that simple. Do that, make these companies operate as non profits, and ask the people in charge of them that question again. Then we can talk about their ideas for disruption and what other people in the healthcare system might consider sacrificing. Nobody should be asked to sacrifice a damn thing for those ghouls as long as they are focused on generating profits for corporate owners and shareholders and not providing patient care.
I would give up my aspirations to become a billionaire. No longer would I see myself as a temporarily inconvenienced man of incredible wealth. Instead I would envision a land where desperate need is the first served, and hoarding resources is shamed.
What would I give up? We’re living on Social Security (for now at least, uneasy about the President’s threats) and I would pay a reasonable amount, say $20, for the immunizations I now receive. Why is it we don’t have universal health care? Is it because Republicans have voted it down and lied about it whenever any form of it has been proposed? Medicare Advantage was set up under the George W. Bush administration specifically to let private firms take more money out of Medicare. I am thankful to have original Medicare and to be able to have a needed operation without spending all of our savings on it. And I am thankful for Social Security, but our current President wants to fiddle with it, calling it a “benefit” when it is our money we have handed over to the federal government, in my case for 63 years, ages 16 to 79. What we need to take out of our health care system is the greed.
This article is really annoying. The number one reason American healthcare is so expensive is that American doctors get paid 2x to 3x what their European counterparts do. And scarcity keeps that number high--America has many fewer doctors per capita than France, Germany, etc. These facts would remain true even if insurance were nonprofit or publicly provided. I am disappointed but not surprised that Dr. Emanuel, a practicing doctor, chose to gloss over this.
Your first sentence is exactly wrong. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. If there were more doctors the price each doctor could command would go down. “Scarce things are more expensive” is basic economics.
Insurance companies have a low profit margin, maybe 2-6 percent. You need to explain how reducing or eliminating that 2-6% would solve the problem.
You also need to explain why American doctors are paid 3 times as much as French doctors and why that does not contribute to the problem.
You are focusing on the idea that highly compensated employees who actually provide patient services are paid too highly while also lamenting the scarcity of that same labor. These two concerns are not compatible nor do they address the cause of this disconnect, the astronomical costs of education to become a doctor. Regardless if you address that issue, let’s be clear that the costs of compensating actual labor, whatever they may be, will never be more than a drop in the bucket compared to the expenses and costs imposed on the system by for profit health insurance companies and administrators. Every dollar cut in expenses for employees and care or taken out by these companies in revenue to maximize shareholder value or to pay out their owners and investors is a dollar stolen from the American healthcare system. Doctors are paid to treat patients, even if you think they are paid too much to do it. They are paid too much to treat patients. Insurers and administrators are paid to serve as nothing more than middle men who manage money and pay out claims, while at the same time they have an actual financial incentive to minimize and avoid if possible, and the money at issue within the insurance company’s management makes that doctor compensation look like Pennies in comparison and make the biggest problem quite obvious and clear
I’m not sure I classify this as giving something up, but people need to be willing (and able) to take care of their own minor medical problems. Rushing to the Emergency Department because you vomited twice, or have a cold (or even the flu or covid), are constipated or have some chronic medical problem. ER’s are overrun with non emergent problems most of which people could solve on their own with a quick trip to the pharmacy to pick up some over-the-counter medication.
Healthcare should be non-profit. Also, i don’t know that everyone needs a private room? I’ve been a hospital frequent flyer for a decade now and never shared a room. I have waited many hours in the ER while they tried to find me a room. It seems like triaging would be so much simpler if patients could be moved to the correct floor and put in rooms with several people. Even 2 to a room would help I would think.
I’ll respectfully push back a bit on the private room because from a hospital acquired infection standpoint, patients sharing bathrooms/sinks, swapping food, and so on would likely exacerbate the already too common problem. It is a rare problem for a hospital to be lacking physical rooms to move patients out of the ER, it is that the hospital can only staff so many rooms due to nursing shortages. That brings me to what I would give up … Magnet Recognition. The push for all nurses to have BSN or MSN levels of education has exacerbated shortages as there are fewer nurses staying at the bedside for more than a few years of their careers. ASN degreed nurses and even LPNs should still have a place in our healthcare system, especially on lower acuity floors and settings. There is certainly still a pathway for career advancement and a need for nurses with advanced education levels in leadership and higher acuity/specialization, but allow for an inviting environment for those with good bedside technical skills and a love for direct patient care.
It is rare for a hospital to not have open rooms. There are rooms not being used (sometimes entire wings or floors that are “closed”). The reason why a patient is told that they are “waiting on a room” is because the hospital can only fill rooms that they are staffed to fill. Managing the nursing shortage goes a much farther way to reducing wait times then doubling up patients in a room. Staffing is based on the number of patients a nurse has and not the number not rooms the nurse has.
The problem is that Americans do not give up things. They don't want to pay more either. They want more for less. Like more services but lower taxes. A big military, but low taxes. Most of us complain about health insurance. Can't get it, bad deal, too expensive, and so on. But don't you dare try to change it because some people who are not like me might get the same deal as I do and that would not be fair to me. Or worse, it might be SOCIALISM. And this is just the consumers who are irrational.
The business side isn't giving up a damn thing. They want to make more money, not less and they will continue to buy politicians to make sure of it.
I've watched this circus long enough to realize that thinking there might be a rational reform of our "system" is simply delusional thinking. Sorry to be so cynical but that is the reality of our society.
You had no chance of getting an honest answer to your question. The well-being of everyone in that room depends on the current structure of the healthcare system. It is wildly dysfunctional, but your entire audience gets richer on that dysfunction.
I believe the translation of "disruptor" you are looking for is "someone other than me".
“Oncologists need to give up being paid more for prescribing more expensive drugs”
I’m quite shocked this still occurs.
I’m a practicing academic OBGYN. My payment doesn’t change based on the medications I prescribe. It doesn’t change based on the instruments I use for surgery.
I know incentive structures are different between specialities and practice models.
I assume Dr. Emanuel is speaking from experience as an oncologist. All I can do is speak from my experience in practice.
There are a lot of problems with medicine in America in 2026. This article posits “drug kickbacks” as a much greater problem than it currently is. I don’t know a single physician who earns a kickback based on the medications they prescribe to their patients.
I’m not sure why American consumers should have to start by “giving anything up”except for the silly strawmen like hospital art collections.
The system doesn’t need compromises by all stakeholders. It needs to be exploded and replaced with something that has a difference balance of power between stakeholders.
First, the CEOs you talked to and their private insurance companies should either play a greatly diminished role or no longer exist altogether. Second, employers should continue to contribute to their employees’ healthcare, but healthcare tied to employment needs to go, especially with the AI train rumbling down the tracks.
As an American living overseas, I can tell you that I can count the number of Americas living overseas who say, “Gee, I miss such-and-such about the U.S. healthcare system” on zero fingers. You could take _literally any_ healthcare system from any Western nation, transplant it into the U.S., and you’d have a system the general public would be more happy with. The reasons it doesn’t happen are politics, greed, and demagoguery — not because Americas need to make sacrifices.
Private plans come with too many loopholes and what is said before you choose your plan and company for the following yr: we have found this information to be wholly inaccurate .
It’s already a long wait time for all specialists unless a fracture or break is urgent.
We must be willing to take our turn.
However as it currently is now as a patient no one really gives you the orient the time or belief system unless you are already an established patient.
Becoming a NEW PATIENT NEEDS TI ALSO BE TRIAGED.
Many need to be seen right away.
Having any health person place yiu in thr penalty box is honestly bad nursing.
As an RN I know who does this and who thinks they are god.
It exsists in every building.
The patient that’s hurting doesn’t need to feel like they are the ones that are the enemy
The way to make American healthcare better is to institute a universal healthcare system. With that, we could eliminate private health plans, which would free up hundreds of billions of dollars a year to pay for actual healthcare.
We only need one plan: all essential healthcare. And we need a fair way to pay for it, with a simple tax related to family income.
Healthcare should be provided by the government because it is the government's responsibility to protect its people. We don't do that in the United States. We let everyone fend for themselves.
We do not have to give up anything to get good healthcare, except for some silly ideas. So, I object to the framing of the question. Stop trying to make us think it would cost more. It could cost a lot less if we did it right.
It would definitely be more efficient to have a universal healthcare system. And the cost of many services and drugs would go down. But it would likely cost more (not that we shouldn't do it anyway) because many people have foregone treatment because they could not afford it. The other factor that will drive up costs is the predictable demand to increase the benefit coverage.
I studied this some time ago. My research indicated that eliminating private health insurance and going to one plan would save hundreds of billions of dollars. That would make up for the increased number of people receiving care and the additional care people would get to provide all essential healthcare.
So, yes, there would be additional costs, but the total cost of the system would be lower. I think we could fit the entire system into 15% of GDP and still provide adequate care for everyone with a universal healthcare system. (We are currently around 18% of GDP.)
And I would tie the amount people pay for coverage to family income. This would also mean that for the vast majority of people their costs would be lower. Right now, the percentage of a person's income that goes to healthcare is higher the poorer you are. In effect, the poor are paying for a healthcare system that the rich take advantage of.
My suggestion is to have the providers negotiate rates with representatives of people in each region. This means that healthcare professionals would be responsible for recommending what should be covered and this would be negotiated with representatives of the public. This puts a limit on the increases in benefit coverage. I would set a standard of “all essential healthcare”. The amount of coverage should be targeted to that standard.
So, I think we could have universal healthcare with reasonable costs that covers everyone to an acceptable level.
I personally at 37 years old would be willing to give up SS benefits if I didn't have to worry about paying for Healthcare for the rest of my life. I can save for retirement on my own and not having to pay for healthcare after retirement is much better than a meager SS check. Most seniors spend it on Healthcare anyway so it's robbing Peter to pay Paul.
That silence your question was met with is because you apparently asked a room full of the people for whom the current healthcare system is working just fine to give something up for the benefit of healthcare workers and patients. What did you expect to happen? Why does their silence lead you to suggest that everyone else has to also give something up rather than put their greed and selfishness on stark display?
Eliminate the profit motive of for profit health insurance and administrative companies and you solve an enormous cause of the problems. It’s that simple. Do that, make these companies operate as non profits, and ask the people in charge of them that question again. Then we can talk about their ideas for disruption and what other people in the healthcare system might consider sacrificing. Nobody should be asked to sacrifice a damn thing for those ghouls as long as they are focused on generating profits for corporate owners and shareholders and not providing patient care.
I would give up my aspirations to become a billionaire. No longer would I see myself as a temporarily inconvenienced man of incredible wealth. Instead I would envision a land where desperate need is the first served, and hoarding resources is shamed.
What would I give up? We’re living on Social Security (for now at least, uneasy about the President’s threats) and I would pay a reasonable amount, say $20, for the immunizations I now receive. Why is it we don’t have universal health care? Is it because Republicans have voted it down and lied about it whenever any form of it has been proposed? Medicare Advantage was set up under the George W. Bush administration specifically to let private firms take more money out of Medicare. I am thankful to have original Medicare and to be able to have a needed operation without spending all of our savings on it. And I am thankful for Social Security, but our current President wants to fiddle with it, calling it a “benefit” when it is our money we have handed over to the federal government, in my case for 63 years, ages 16 to 79. What we need to take out of our health care system is the greed.
This article is really annoying. The number one reason American healthcare is so expensive is that American doctors get paid 2x to 3x what their European counterparts do. And scarcity keeps that number high--America has many fewer doctors per capita than France, Germany, etc. These facts would remain true even if insurance were nonprofit or publicly provided. I am disappointed but not surprised that Dr. Emanuel, a practicing doctor, chose to gloss over this.
Your first sentence is exactly wrong. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. If there were more doctors the price each doctor could command would go down. “Scarce things are more expensive” is basic economics.
Insurance companies have a low profit margin, maybe 2-6 percent. You need to explain how reducing or eliminating that 2-6% would solve the problem.
You also need to explain why American doctors are paid 3 times as much as French doctors and why that does not contribute to the problem.
You are focusing on the idea that highly compensated employees who actually provide patient services are paid too highly while also lamenting the scarcity of that same labor. These two concerns are not compatible nor do they address the cause of this disconnect, the astronomical costs of education to become a doctor. Regardless if you address that issue, let’s be clear that the costs of compensating actual labor, whatever they may be, will never be more than a drop in the bucket compared to the expenses and costs imposed on the system by for profit health insurance companies and administrators. Every dollar cut in expenses for employees and care or taken out by these companies in revenue to maximize shareholder value or to pay out their owners and investors is a dollar stolen from the American healthcare system. Doctors are paid to treat patients, even if you think they are paid too much to do it. They are paid too much to treat patients. Insurers and administrators are paid to serve as nothing more than middle men who manage money and pay out claims, while at the same time they have an actual financial incentive to minimize and avoid if possible, and the money at issue within the insurance company’s management makes that doctor compensation look like Pennies in comparison and make the biggest problem quite obvious and clear
I’m not sure I classify this as giving something up, but people need to be willing (and able) to take care of their own minor medical problems. Rushing to the Emergency Department because you vomited twice, or have a cold (or even the flu or covid), are constipated or have some chronic medical problem. ER’s are overrun with non emergent problems most of which people could solve on their own with a quick trip to the pharmacy to pick up some over-the-counter medication.
I’m willing to give up billionaires
What would I give up? Some of my income.
If I can get European style benefits with European level tax rates, I would gladly accept a much lower check.
Healthcare should be non-profit. Also, i don’t know that everyone needs a private room? I’ve been a hospital frequent flyer for a decade now and never shared a room. I have waited many hours in the ER while they tried to find me a room. It seems like triaging would be so much simpler if patients could be moved to the correct floor and put in rooms with several people. Even 2 to a room would help I would think.
I’ll respectfully push back a bit on the private room because from a hospital acquired infection standpoint, patients sharing bathrooms/sinks, swapping food, and so on would likely exacerbate the already too common problem. It is a rare problem for a hospital to be lacking physical rooms to move patients out of the ER, it is that the hospital can only staff so many rooms due to nursing shortages. That brings me to what I would give up … Magnet Recognition. The push for all nurses to have BSN or MSN levels of education has exacerbated shortages as there are fewer nurses staying at the bedside for more than a few years of their careers. ASN degreed nurses and even LPNs should still have a place in our healthcare system, especially on lower acuity floors and settings. There is certainly still a pathway for career advancement and a need for nurses with advanced education levels in leadership and higher acuity/specialization, but allow for an inviting environment for those with good bedside technical skills and a love for direct patient care.
A shared hospital room is better than no room.
It is rare for a hospital to not have open rooms. There are rooms not being used (sometimes entire wings or floors that are “closed”). The reason why a patient is told that they are “waiting on a room” is because the hospital can only fill rooms that they are staffed to fill. Managing the nursing shortage goes a much farther way to reducing wait times then doubling up patients in a room. Staffing is based on the number of patients a nurse has and not the number not rooms the nurse has.
My job has changed health care plans five times in four years. We need a single-payer system.
The problem is that Americans do not give up things. They don't want to pay more either. They want more for less. Like more services but lower taxes. A big military, but low taxes. Most of us complain about health insurance. Can't get it, bad deal, too expensive, and so on. But don't you dare try to change it because some people who are not like me might get the same deal as I do and that would not be fair to me. Or worse, it might be SOCIALISM. And this is just the consumers who are irrational.
The business side isn't giving up a damn thing. They want to make more money, not less and they will continue to buy politicians to make sure of it.
I've watched this circus long enough to realize that thinking there might be a rational reform of our "system" is simply delusional thinking. Sorry to be so cynical but that is the reality of our society.
You had no chance of getting an honest answer to your question. The well-being of everyone in that room depends on the current structure of the healthcare system. It is wildly dysfunctional, but your entire audience gets richer on that dysfunction.
I believe the translation of "disruptor" you are looking for is "someone other than me".
“Oncologists need to give up being paid more for prescribing more expensive drugs”
I’m quite shocked this still occurs.
I’m a practicing academic OBGYN. My payment doesn’t change based on the medications I prescribe. It doesn’t change based on the instruments I use for surgery.
I know incentive structures are different between specialities and practice models.
I assume Dr. Emanuel is speaking from experience as an oncologist. All I can do is speak from my experience in practice.
There are a lot of problems with medicine in America in 2026. This article posits “drug kickbacks” as a much greater problem than it currently is. I don’t know a single physician who earns a kickback based on the medications they prescribe to their patients.
I’m not sure why American consumers should have to start by “giving anything up”except for the silly strawmen like hospital art collections.
The system doesn’t need compromises by all stakeholders. It needs to be exploded and replaced with something that has a difference balance of power between stakeholders.
First, the CEOs you talked to and their private insurance companies should either play a greatly diminished role or no longer exist altogether. Second, employers should continue to contribute to their employees’ healthcare, but healthcare tied to employment needs to go, especially with the AI train rumbling down the tracks.
As an American living overseas, I can tell you that I can count the number of Americas living overseas who say, “Gee, I miss such-and-such about the U.S. healthcare system” on zero fingers. You could take _literally any_ healthcare system from any Western nation, transplant it into the U.S., and you’d have a system the general public would be more happy with. The reasons it doesn’t happen are politics, greed, and demagoguery — not because Americas need to make sacrifices.
Private plans come with too many loopholes and what is said before you choose your plan and company for the following yr: we have found this information to be wholly inaccurate .
It’s already a long wait time for all specialists unless a fracture or break is urgent.
We must be willing to take our turn.
However as it currently is now as a patient no one really gives you the orient the time or belief system unless you are already an established patient.
Becoming a NEW PATIENT NEEDS TI ALSO BE TRIAGED.
Many need to be seen right away.
Having any health person place yiu in thr penalty box is honestly bad nursing.
As an RN I know who does this and who thinks they are god.
It exsists in every building.
The patient that’s hurting doesn’t need to feel like they are the ones that are the enemy
Why would I have to give up ANYTHING?
The way to make American healthcare better is to institute a universal healthcare system. With that, we could eliminate private health plans, which would free up hundreds of billions of dollars a year to pay for actual healthcare.
We only need one plan: all essential healthcare. And we need a fair way to pay for it, with a simple tax related to family income.
Healthcare should be provided by the government because it is the government's responsibility to protect its people. We don't do that in the United States. We let everyone fend for themselves.
We do not have to give up anything to get good healthcare, except for some silly ideas. So, I object to the framing of the question. Stop trying to make us think it would cost more. It could cost a lot less if we did it right.
It would definitely be more efficient to have a universal healthcare system. And the cost of many services and drugs would go down. But it would likely cost more (not that we shouldn't do it anyway) because many people have foregone treatment because they could not afford it. The other factor that will drive up costs is the predictable demand to increase the benefit coverage.
I studied this some time ago. My research indicated that eliminating private health insurance and going to one plan would save hundreds of billions of dollars. That would make up for the increased number of people receiving care and the additional care people would get to provide all essential healthcare.
So, yes, there would be additional costs, but the total cost of the system would be lower. I think we could fit the entire system into 15% of GDP and still provide adequate care for everyone with a universal healthcare system. (We are currently around 18% of GDP.)
And I would tie the amount people pay for coverage to family income. This would also mean that for the vast majority of people their costs would be lower. Right now, the percentage of a person's income that goes to healthcare is higher the poorer you are. In effect, the poor are paying for a healthcare system that the rich take advantage of.
My suggestion is to have the providers negotiate rates with representatives of people in each region. This means that healthcare professionals would be responsible for recommending what should be covered and this would be negotiated with representatives of the public. This puts a limit on the increases in benefit coverage. I would set a standard of “all essential healthcare”. The amount of coverage should be targeted to that standard.
So, I think we could have universal healthcare with reasonable costs that covers everyone to an acceptable level.
hear, hear!!!