Maverick's Update

Can’t you just feel the slower summer days coming to an end? We will miss the bad movies and silly beach reads — the brain candy was a nice diversion. Proof is that we watched the totally dumb movie, Uncharted, which came to Netflix a bit early, with Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas. It was like watching a slightly-more-interesting version of Fool’s Gold (a vapid film in 2008 with Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, and Donald Sutherland). Speaking of Matthew McConaughey, we explain in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below how he helps illustrate that it is a slow time for health policy.

More proof that health policy is slow right now:

• Primary care doctors are reportedly being slow to share data with public health agencies. According to a data brief from the HHS Office of National Coordinator of Health IT, less than one in five primary care providers used a computer to share data with a public health agency in 2019. Paper and faxes, though, were favorites of anyone with a Norman Rockwell painting hanging in their waiting rooms.

• Everyone’s pandemic policy hero, telehealth, just slowed down when Amazon Care announced that it is terminating its business as of December 31, 2022. More here, here. Amazon launched the virtual care program for its own employees in 2019 as an experiment, and quickly expanded to other employer groups — but it is over, apparently.

• Even American workaholics are being forced to slow down, which could slow down our economy. A new report from the Brookings Institution claims that the mysterious and diverse health condition known as “Long Covid” is preventing millions of Americans from returning to work.

One Thoughtful Paragraph