Is the Doctor In? Fighting to Access the American Healthcare System

What does access to healthcare mean in a country where coverage isn’t guaranteed? This Thanksgiving Day, The Takeaway explores healthcare access in America — what does it mean, who has it, and what does it cost? Here’s what you’ll find in this special episode:

• Access to healthcare — what does it mean, who has it, and what does it cost? Nancy Tomes, distinguished professor of history at Stony Brook University and the author of “Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients Into Consumers,” weighs in.

• Roughly 50 million Americans live in places where it’s difficult to get routine dental care. Even for those that do, dental pricing and insurance is a complicated web of exceptions, and state laws that can raise barriers to proper care. Journalist Mary Otto traveled around the country to examine the state of American dental care. She wrote about it in her book, “Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America,” and shares her findings on The Takeaway.

• Two drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in August have marked a turning point for many researchers who’ve been chasing gene therapies for decades. Dr. Cynthia Dunbar works in the hematology branch at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. She joins The Takeaway to explain how gene therapy works, and why it can offer relief for rare, debilitating, and often deadly diseases.

• Emily Mullin, associate editor of biomedicine at MIT Technology Review, says that gene therapy represents “a complete shift in thinking about how we treat disease.”  But gene therapy treatments can cost patients hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. What is a cure worth, and who should pay? Mullin explores that question today on The Takeaway.

• According to the 2016 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings report, “nearly one in five rural counties has experienced worsening premature death rates over the past decade.” Maggie Elehwany, government affairs and policy vice president at the National Rural Health Association, says rural America is experiencing a crisis that is overwhelming small communities.

• In 2015, a report from the National Center for Health Statistics found that in order to save money, “nearly 8 percent of U.S. adults did not take their medication as prescribed.” This can have catastrophic effects on the mental and physical well being of patients. It’s a story that’s all too familiar for Deby Provost, who was diagnosed with MS in the early 2000s. She tells her story to WNYC’s Mary Harris.

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich