MINNESOTA
OCTOBER 2020
PHYSICIAN
THE INDEPENDENT MEDICAL BUSINESS JOURNAL
Volume XXXIV, No. 07
What’s 20% Over the National Norm? Health Care Costs in St. Cloud BY JULIE ANDERSON, M.D. AND DERIK WELDON, M.D.
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ver the past several months, physicians and other healthcare providers, business representatives, and patients in Central Minnesota have gathered to promote patientcentered, transparent, personalized, cost-effective healthcare in our region. The communitybased group, which has organized as “Central Minnesotans for Healthcare Independence” (CMHI), is dedicated to a strong health care infrastructure in Central Minnesota.
Keeping Politics Out of Science and Public Health COVID-19 Shines a Light BY PENNY WHEELER, MD AND EMILY BARSON
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OVID-19 has magnified the critical problems in our health care system, heightened people’s awareness of its flaws, as well as the need to improve it. One needn’t look further than the fact that the United States accounts for 22 percent of global COVID-19 deaths despite making up 4 percent of the global population. Amid this great resetting, we must take every opportunity to rethink the parts of the health care system that are not serving people and build a more reliable and robust health care system for the future. Keeping Politics Out of Science and Public Health to page 104
After several formal and informal discussions, the group concluded that there are many compelling reasons to take action and attempt to re-direct What’s 20% Over the National Norm? to page 124
