A recent report at the medical science website Stat+ called the coming ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency a "new era for federal health agencies and the industries they oversee." Add medical reform advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the mix and that may be an understatement.
Kennedy recently called America "the sickest country in the world," and President-Elect Trump has said he will let him "go wild" with medical reform efforts.
Such an agenda is long overdue, Healthcare Finance Specialists CEO David Balat told KTRH, and while it's unclear how tough it will be to change much of the system, there are plenty of opportunities for improvement.
What would really be tough, he said, is to continue healthcare as it is. "A lot of the statistics related to the healthcare industry are, well, they're unsustainable, is the best way to put it.
"Y'know, reforming the largest agency of the federal government, the Dept. of Health and Human Services, is incredibly important because most of our active pharmaceutical ingredients used in most drugs are sourced from China [for example].
"I think these are good things to at least talk about...like bringing drug manufacturing back to the U.S. We want to make sure that the drug ingredients are up to standard and that there's not a national security issue either.
"And privacy of health information is important, and the business of health care. The business of healthcare has gotten to be so large and so valuable that you have a lot of middle men that have been extracting much of those resources and those values to the degree that they have created problems between doctors and patients."
To consumers, it may be the most obvious manifestation of health care changes in the past decade: a feeling that the doctor-patient relationship is not as close as it once was. And it may be the most obvious proof that healthcare reforms, including insurance regulation, paperwork, reporting, rules compliance and especially increasingly heavy-handed regulation are greatly needed.