Listen: How Much Does It Cost to Get COVID-19?
What is the financial toll on those who get sick? And will the pandemic change our health-care system? Howard Forman, a Yale professor and practicing radiologist, joins James Hamblin and Katherine Wells on the Social Distance podcast to explain the costs of American medicine and what it would take to bring those costs down.
Listen to their conversation here:
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What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
James Hamblin: What’s the scene in the emergency room at Yale New Haven right now?
Howard Forman: The mood is actually pretty good. But the floors really need help.
Hamblin: Katherine, by floors he means, like, upstairs where the people go after they’ve been admitted.
Forman: We have 25 COVID floors.
Hamblin: Twenty-five?
Forman: Yeah. And I consult on them now for conflict issues and leadership and management issues. And it’s really touching to hear the stories and what people are dealing with. Aside from the patients, which is obviously the most devastating, but the nurses, the physicians, the relationships that the nurses form with patients. It’s very challenging. That is where the pain is, and where there’s going to be a lot of psychosocial stress to be dealt with for a long time.
So you’re describing a lot of sacrifice and risk taking and heroism on the part of health-care workers. And we’ve heard a lot about that and hope to keep hearing more. And something I’ve been thinking about as well, and heard I guess not quite as much about, is the cost
