More Wokeness in Health Care

It is frightening to watch a huge segment of our nation’s population in the grip of the delusional mania known as wokeness, which takes identity politics to their Alice-in-Wonderland extreme.  Under the Biden non-administration, the mental incapacity of our supposed head-of-state means that the inmates are running the asylum and wokeness has gone beserk.  Health and health care is important to every American, and the infestion of wokeness threatens the quality of both individual health and the delivery of good health care.  But of course, money is always behind everything and there are a multitude of companies eager to see how much profit they can garner from any trend, regardless of how pernicious the effect.

And so it is with wokeness and one of of our large, supposedly pre-eminent consulting firms.  Deloitte’s health consulting division sees fit to splash out with its take on need for “equity” in health care.  As usual the whackos twist and subvert language.  What they mean by equity is equal outcomes, achieved by whatever means, but usually in their case by dragging those doing well down to the bottom.  And that pursuit of equity also requires ignoring individual responsibility and behavior.  We are told by Deloitte in a new report that inequities in health care are costing us $320 billion a year and that will rise to one trillion dollars by 2040.  Less true bullshit was never spoken.  (Deloitte Report)   But this is standard consultant marketing strategy–make up a report identifying a supposedly huge problem and then charge a fortune to help fix the non-existent problem.

This, as usual, is made-up modeling crap.  Supposed racial, socio-economic and sex disparities in health and health care are behind all this excess spending.  I have news for the neuronically challenged analysts at Deloitte.  Those “disparities” are caused by poor individual health and health care seeking behaviors.  Almost anyone can find a way to get Medicaid coverage or even to concoct some disability that leads to Medicare coverage.  In both cases, and especially Medicaid, the coverage is better than the average employee has through work.  There is no financial issue in accessing health care.  And those populations supposedly burdened with inequities are barraged with government and provider messages about their health and health care.

But among these sub-populations there are high rates of poor diet, no exercise, excessive drug and alcohol use, and failure to seek readily available care.  The causes behind these behaviors have to do with cultural factors that ignore the health impacts and may even encourage destructive practices.  If you want better health status for all Americans, you better figure out how to create a culture of personal responsibility for health.  Moaning about inequities won’t make a bit of difference.  But it will allow consultants to generate lots of business by ginning up phoney reviews and recommendations for governments, health plans and providers.  In this case, Deloitte can pick up a lot of headlines in the always wokester-compliant media, which is great free marketing.  And in the end, making money is all they care about and none of this nonsense will actually improve people’s health one bit.