Easy III

I guess this is a three post topic. Achieving the goals of medicine is easy. The ways to optimize societal health are clear. We need to reduce, then eliminate smoking. Patients need to get their health care maintenance, cancer screening, and vaccinations. Health care needs to be accessible to all people, and at the same time, primary care needs to be appealing enough for doctors to go into it. Fixing social issues will have an incredible impact on health: reducing fast food, emphasizing regular exercise, improving education, providing jobs. By eliminating disparities in other societal aspects, health comes easily. It's easy to figure out why the U.S. spends so much money in health care but has such poor outcomes. We aren't investing wisely; we put too much money into fancy pharmaceuticals, expensive technologies, acute care, and the end of life that give us little yield. We're focusing on the trees rather than the forest, and in doing so, we have mired ourselves so deep that we're having trouble getting out even though the solution is crystal clear.