News & Insights
News & Insights
BOOK: JOE PUBLIC 2030
Predict-O-Meter
Joe Public 2030 makes five bold predictions about the future, which range from exciting and promising to ominous and discouraging. Through the Predict-O-Meter, we continuously assess the state of the healthcare industry to track the accuracy of the five predictions.It’s been a full year since our last Predict-O-Meter update, and we’re halfway to 2030. So how are our predictions holding up?
Five Potent Predictions Reshaping How Consumers Engage Healthcare
FALL 2024 UPDATE
What influenced our latest rating?
If we could invent a higher ranking than “Nailed It,” we’d apply it to this prediction. A year ago, with the emergence of the “medical freedom” movement with clinical offerings opening in Florida, it was fair to mark “The Rise of the Health Sects” as a done deal. Little did we know what was coming on November 5, when the national election ushered in the Trump administration, with a full Republican congress. What follows is likely to be a widespread application of political health beliefs to our national health policy. And that’s with or without the confirmation of Robert Kennedy Jr., an avowed vaccine opponent and overall healthcare outlier. Consider Idaho, where a local health board made it illegal to provide Covid-19 vaccines, a first in the country. The influence of political views on healthcare has already rocked the U.S. in the first part of this decade, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the Dobbs decision on abortion. It’s hard to believe that politization of healthcare could grow in the second half of the decade, but from women’s reproductive rights to LGBTQ and transgender healthcare to the ACA, HIPAA and other healthcare laws, it’s likely going to be a very bumpy few years.
Relevant News
- Documents show how conservative doctors influenced abortion, trans rights – The Washington Post, June 15, 2023
- Report: Abortion bans led to life-threatening health complications – Axios, May 16, 2023
- Post-Roe, contraception could be next – CU Boulder Today, October 9, 2023
ORIGINAL PREDICTION
Challenges to and skepticism of the mainstream medical field and science itself have exploded in the past two years because of the pandemic and political tribalism in the U.S. Anti-vaxxers, non-maskers and Covid deniers are just the start of an expansion of this distrust of experts, which taken to its potential end could result in multiple “health sects” – primary “schools” of medical thought that coalesce around political/world-views. Imagine “Mainstreamers,” who follow the establishment healthcare point of view, “Progressives” who follow minimal medical intervention combined with complementary and alternative medical solutions, and “Contrarians” who deny mainstream medical thought and create their own set of “alternative facts” on everything from vaccines to childbirth to end of life care, and everything in between. These sects will not only follow the medical thinking that best fits their world-view, they may in fact create their own reality through alternative research, diagnosis and treatment approaches, and models for the delivery of care itself.
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