Join 📚 Nicole's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Nicole's read, .
So Covid’s long-term effects will reverberate through the country: [lower trust in institutions](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9242572/), an [absolute unwillingness](https://www.vox.com/23001426/pandemic-proof) to think seriously about preventing the next pandemic, [failing schools](https://www.vox.com/education/372475/math-reading-school-covid-education-learning-loss-kids), and [rising isolation](https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21173938/coronavirus-covid-19-social-distancing-elderly-epidemic-isolation-quarantine). And all that will unfold without any real clarity on how we got here and how we can make sure it never happens again.
America — And the Media — Needs a Covid Reckoning
Kelsey Piper
2024 was arguably the year that the mortal dangers of corporate medicine finally became undeniable and inescapable. A study published in *JAMA* found that, after hospitals were acquired by private-equity firms, Medicare patients were more likely to suffer falls and contract bloodstream infections; another study found that if private equity acquired a nursing home its residents became eleven per cent more likely to die. Although private-equity firms often argue that they infuse hospitals with capital, a recent analysis found that hospital assets tend to decrease after acquisition. Yet P.E. now oversees nearly a third of staffing in U.S. emergency departments and owns more than four hundred and fifty hospitals. In some of them, patients were “forced to sleep in hallways, and doctors who spoke out were threatened with termination,” according to Jonathan Jones, a former president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine.
The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here | the New Yorker
Dhruv Khullar
Something inside unclenches. It’s equivalent to that moment when, caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella, you finally abandon your futile efforts to stay dry, and accept getting soaked to the skin. Very well, then: this is how things are.
Meditations for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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