What Matters: Health Care essays curated by McKinsey & Company

Health care

Is it possible to provide adequate health care for all? If not, what gives?

Personalized medicine: An interview with Esther Dyson

12 June 2009

Esther Dyson speaks about her participation in the Personal Genome Project, an initiative that aims to build and correlate genetic databases and personal risk factors, and 23andMe, her commercial venture that offers consumers the ability to read and understand their DNA. McKinsey’s director of publishing, Rik Kirkland, conducted this interview with Esther Dyson in April 2009. Watch the video, or read the transcript.

Advancing rural telemedicine: An interview with Sameer Sawarkar

12 June 2009

The challenges of health care delivery in rural India are several and familiar: poor infrastructure, insufficient supply of skilled doctors, and dispersed poor populations, all of which make affordable care hard to achieve. Sameer Sawarkar, founder and CEO of Neurosynpatic Communications, says technology can bridge this deep divide.

In this video interview, he discusses ReMeDi—his low-cost telemedicine solution that aims to connect rural patients to urban doctors via the Internet. McKinsey’s Clay Chandler interviewed Mr. Sawarkar at Neurosynaptic’s Bangalore office in April.

A transcript of this interview is available here.

Health should be at the heart of health IT

By Carol Diamond and Josh Lemieux

12 June 2009

With billions of taxpayer dollars about to be invested, the stakes are indisputably high to set the right priorities for accelerating the benefits of health information technology. What should those priorities be?

Audio interview with Paul Farmer

4 June 2009

Medical anthropologist and doctor Paul Farmer has spent most of his career providing healthcare to some of the world’s most destitute communities, through his organization Partners in Health, which he co-founded in 1987. In this What Matters podcast, Dr. Farmer speaks with McKinsey’s Mary Kuntz about his organization’s approach to treating chronic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis in countries around the world such as Haiti, Peru, Russia, and Rwanda. He also discusses the medical and moral imperative for affluent nations to provide assistance, and the future of global health.

Download MP3 [15.4 MB]

Read a transcript of this interview

Adequate and affordable health for all

By John Rother

3 June 2009

The need for comprehensive reform of health care financing, insurance coverage, and delivery has never been so urgent. With close to 50 million Americans now lacking coverage, the need for a new model is rapidly increasing.

Can the United States provide health care for all?

By Regina Herzlinger

18 May 2009

Of course.

After all, providing universal coverage, at, say, an average cost of $5,000 per person, will cost at most $250 billion annually and likely less because some of the uninsured can afford to pay part of the cost of their health insurance—a quarter earn more than $40,000- and many are lower-cost young people.

The cure for US health care is right in front of us; let’s seize it now

By Jacob S. Hacker

18 May 2009

Many problems in our society defy easy policy solutions. But the glaring failure of our jerry-rigged framework of health insurance to provide affordable quality care to all Americans is not one of them.

Three keys to curbing costs

By Paul Mango and Nicolaus Henke

26 February 2009

Is it possible to provide adequate care to all? The short answer to this question is an emphatic yes, from both an economic and an ethical perspective. Yet we must understand that achieving these goals poses radically different challenges depending on local conditions, extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of the health care system alone, and requires reciprocal obligations between the government and the individual.

Way too much for way too little

By Uwe E. Reinhardt

26 February 2009

Does providing an “adequate” level of care merely mean making sure that there is a minimum level of care below which no one in society is permitted to fall—while wealthier individuals have the option of purchasing superior care? Or should all members of society, rich and poor, have the same “adequate” health care experience?

Innovative business models for the poor

By Jacqueline Novogratz

26 February 2009

The resources, the technologies, and the knowledge to provide adequate medical services to everyone do exist. What we don’t have are innovative and efficient business models to deliver them.

The politics of food

By M. James Kondo

26 February 2009

What an irony: a world where some people literally kill themselves by overeating, while an equal number of people are dying of hunger. Observing this dichotomy, one must assume that the politics of food will come to occupy center stage in the world’s health and social policies in the coming years.

Hub-and-spoke health care

By George C. Halvorson

26 February 2009

A key reality we need to recognize is that trying to bring a standard Western medical-care model to poor countries is very often a prescription for failure.

The case for competition

By Alain Enthoven

26 February 2009

Value for money must be considered as valid for health care as it is for anything else.

A cheaper way to better health

By Charles Kenny

26 February 2009

Relatively good health need not be expensive. It doesn’t take highly trained doctors or fully equipped hospitals. Instead, a few simple measures can lead to dramatic improvement.

Company health care: A dead idea

By Matt Miller

26 February 2009

The United States is unique among advanced nations in organizing much of its society around this notion, and in building a vast array of institutions that cement its primacy in our culture. This organizing idea leaves tens of millions of Americans vulnerable and anxious, while shackling companies with soaring costs that render them uncompetitive.