Why Our Healthcare System Needs to Do More than Just "Fairly" Distribute Scarce Resources (w/ Lily Sánchez)

Current Affairs

Lily Sánchez is the managing editor of Current Affairs, and also a physician. In a new article for the magazine, Lily draws on her experiences practicing medicine to discuss different conceptions of what health justice requires. She reviews an acclaimed book called The People's Hospital by Ricardo Nuila, which covers a public hospital that Lily also worked at. Nuila sees this hospital as a model for fairness in healthcare. Sánchez, by contrast, sees it as a place that can't help but be unfair, because it's part of a healthcare system that is unjust to its core. The differences between the perspectives of Nuila and Sánchez help us to think about what it would mean to care for people "fairly." For Nuila, we don't need Medicare For All. For Sánchez, Medicare For All is only a start. In this episode, Lily and Nathan talk about the hospital that she and Nuila both worked at, what Lily saw in medicine, and what she thinks the limits of liberal healthcare reform are.

Our episode with Mark Vonnegut can be found here. Listeners may also be interested in our old interview with Timothy Faust, the author of Health Justice Now. Lily's article on "zombie" medicine is here.

"We need radical change and a healthcare system in which for-profit health insurance is rendered irrelevant. Healthcare must be more than a commodity, something we aim to get a fair deal on. Our priority should be to build a healthy and sustainable society, prevent disease as much as possible (and treat it effectively when it arises), and give everyone the care they need when they need it, free at the point of use. This will require nothing short of a political movement as well as the willingness to challenge the market logic that is pervasive in healthcare." — Lily Sánchez