Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas

or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question

at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Melinda Bunting, a health economist at Vanderbilt School of

Medicine, about what health care systems could look like post-COVID-19. They discuss the cracks that

have been exposed during the pandemic and how we don't want to go back to business as usual,

but to create something better. Let's listen. Dr. Melinda Buntin, thanks so much for joining

me. I am delighted to talk to you, Stephanie. So today I wanted to have you here to talk about

the future of health care beyond COVID and the future of public health beyond COVID. I know that

the COVID pandemic has really exposed fissures in the health care

infrastructure, in the public health infrastructure. And I'm wondering if you could sort of give me a lay

at the land, what we've seen. Absolutely. So what I hope the future of health care and public health,

as you put it so well, is in this country

is not what we've seen during the pandemic. So during the pandemic, we saw a health care

system that couldn't respond well, where fee-for-service payment meant that providers were

laying people off in the middle of a pandemic when they were needed. It meant that providers were laying people off in the middle of a pandemic when they

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