Robin Hanson’s classic article comes to this conclusion:
Perhaps the most striking puzzle in health policy is the apparent lack of an aggregate empirical relation between medical care and health. Observed variations in medical care typically have an insignificant effect on average population health, even when looking at large data sets, sets larger than those which convinced most researchers of the reality of many other influences on health.
Racial bias in medicine takes many forms. It occurs when an older black guy sees his doctor, who doesn’t bother to prescribe drugs for hypertension because he assumes his patient will be noncompliant. Maybe it’s when a doctor doesn’t try to counsel her patient with high cholesterol because she assumes Hispanics suffer from with high cholesterol due to deeply entrench lifestyle behaviors. There are even debates that some treatment algorithms used in hospitals are biased due to biased programming.
Operation Warp Speed produced a new vaccine for a novel virus in record time but when Operation Warp Speed was disbanded by the Biden administration vaccine research and development slowed from warp speed to impulse power. It’s ridiculous that it is taking longer to develop and deploy tweaks to the mRNA vaccines to deal with new variants than it took to develop the original vaccines from scratch. By the time we get an Omicron-specific vaccine that variant will have disappeared. This is no way to run a civilization.
Weekly telemedicine visits for one insurer increased from a mean of 773 in 2020 prior to stay-at-home orders to 45,632 in subsequent weeks. Patients who were older, had existing chronic conditions, were male, or resided in predominantly non-Hispanic Black or African American Census tracts showed increased telemedicine utilization in later weeks of the pandemic.