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7 Things You Should Never Mention About Healthcare

More and more sick-care topics are verboten. Given the increasing polarization of Americans and American politics, you simply can't mention certain topics without creating hard feelings, or worse, physical harm.

Doctor, Silence, Shh

More and more sick-care topics are verboten. Given the increasing polarization of Americans and American politics, you simply can't mention certain topics without creating hard feelings, or worse, physical harm.

Here is my list of the top seven third rails in American sick care:

1. Money, medicine, and third-party reimbursement and entitlement reform: Medicare and Medicaid reform, payment for services to illegal immigrants, paying for outsourced care to foreign providers, banning for-profit health insurance companies, sick care as a right or benefit.

2. Patients as terrible consumers of care and the failure of the patient engagement movement.

3. Privatizing the VA.

4. Racism and sexism in American medicine.

5. Physician income inequality.

6. Relying on personal responsibility or the government to change sick care to healthcare.

7. Eliminating employer-based health benefits as a defined benefit.

That silence you hear, particularly around presidential election cycles, is the status quo creaking forward. So how about that Masters Meltdown?

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