As someone inside the healthcare system, I can confidently state that COVID simply brought out a lot of festering problems that already existed. The pandemic didn’t create those problems, it revealed them.

The one “but” here is that COVID did help speed up the timeline on doctor/nurse/caregiver burnout as well and create a bottleneck in getting care due to sheer numbers which is still happening right now. How long are you waiting for your next PCP appointment, or to get established with one? (One example).

And as another “but”. What I just said above was already the trajectory of the system. We simply had a little healthcare “inflation” that sped all of that up.