Isolation at home and social distancing everywhere else. Are they making you feel anxious? If so,

you are not alone. Later on in this podcast, we'll talk about the mental health consequences

of a global emergency that none of us now living has ever experienced before. In the meantime, we'll look at

what's being called an unanticipated silver lining. With all the debate about Obamacare and

universal coverage and Medicare for all, it's been all too clear that America's health care

system as currently structured is not sustainable. Now comes the coronavirus

pandemic, revealing, quote, some of the worst elements of America's broken health system.

That's from the New York Times op-ed piece by Dr. Amal Navathay and Ezekiel Emanuel,

directors of the University of Pennsylvania's Healthcare Transformation Institute.

Dr. Navathi joins us. Welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Before we get to transformation, what are the worst elements of the broken system that are now being revealed?

So the broken system, I think from an infrastructure perspective is probably the main thing

that we've revealed in the COVID pandemic.

So I think there's two things that I would highlight.

So one is our ability to quickly shift capacity to areas of health care that we really need.

That's one area that we've realized that

we probably weren't as ready as we thought we were. And that's purely from an emergency

preparedness perspective. The second aspect that I would highlight is not related to COVID

per se, but I think the change in practice patterns that we've experienced

as part of COVID has revealed that our system has been stuck in a legacy way of doing things

when actually we very much had the capacity from a human perspective, from the ability of

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