I asked a boring question on LinkedIn.
What broken part of the healthcare system did you once hate that you now just shrug at?
The answers were telling. Not because they uncovered hidden conspiracies, but because they showed us our own exhaustion. People didn’t point to scandals. They pointed to the daily grind. Carrying paper records because the apps don’t sync. Bills that make no sense. Prior auths that tell your doctor to take a hike. Jobs created only because the software sucks.
It was a diagnostic test. And the patient—the system—tested positive for learned helplessness.
We have decided the absurd is acceptable.
Patients Are Now Data Mules
Sherita Golden put a name to the friction everyone feels. Her patients carry medical files on their phones. Why? Because the hospital systems refuse to talk to each other.
This shouldn’t happen.
Try banking this way. Your credit card works. Your flight boarding pass works. Retail knows what you bought last Tuesday.
In healthcare? You are the USB drive.
You carry the med list. You repeat the history. You upload the labs twice. You translate the specialist to the primary care physician. We spent billions on electronic health records and ended up turning patients into logistics managers.
That isn’t patient-centered. It’s lazy design dumped on someone else’s head.
Prices As Surprises
Philip Louie noted a funny thing about the market.
“The patient is the last person to know the number.”
The hospital knows. The insurer knows. The surgeon guesses. The patient? They get the invoice later.
Patrick Kennedy added that the guy sitting next to you might pay half as much for the same shot in the arm.
Abbie DuBois said the jargon doesn’t help. Deductibles, coinsurance, EOBs—it’s a foreign language. We call it benefit design. Patients call it a headache. Then we blame them for being bad shoppers.
Who is the fool here?
Waiting Is Harm
Bob Hitson asked a heavy question: Why do we live with pain just because the calendar is full?
We treat wait times as ops issues. They aren’t.
Delay is biology.
A delay can be a tumor growing. A delay can be anxiety eating you alive. Ruchir Sinha noted that some diagnoses arrive months late—useless by then. The specialist is booked till October. The referral is stuck. The portal has results, but nobody called.
We accept the wait. Then we accept the outcome.
Late care is still late.
The Doctor Is Not The Boss
Prior authorization killed the mood in the thread.
Allison Silvers called it out: Someone who isn’t you or your doctor decides if your medicine is necessary.
Jillian Shellaburger described the classic loop. The insurance company makes you try three drugs before they’ll pay for the one that works.
Sure. Resources are finite. We can’t pay for everything. But let’s be real. The doctor recommends A. The paperwork blocks it. The patient fights while sick.
Trust dies in paperwork.
Jobs For Glue
Malik Haynes dropped a bomb.
“Entire jobs exist just because two processes don’t connect.”
That’s haunting.
Think of the coordinators. The fixers. The navigators who pick up the slack between siloed departments. They’re heroes. They’re also proof the house is on fire.
Leatha Melton went deeper. The problem isn’t execution. It’s architecture.
Operational fixes require hustle. Architectural fixes require rebuilding the foundation.
We hire people to manually stitch together what should have been designed properly. We call it efficiency. It’s actually triage for a broken map.
The Quiet Resignation
The scariest replies weren’t angry. They were tired.
Amy Paez hears one question constantly: “Who can I trust?”
Andrew Tsang called it the Great Resignation of the spirit. People know the system is rigged. So they stop caring that it’s rigged.
Bad forms get fixed. Broken links get repaired. But cynicism? That’s terminal.
Resignation happens when complexity becomes a shield. Leaders call moral failures operational challenges. We call confusion health literacy issues. We call hiding the truth proprietary business models.
We stop seeing the cracks because we’ve learned to walk around them.
Waiting For Disaster
Julian Holman hit the nail on the head. We only learn after the body falls.
We have great incident reports. We suck at seeing weak signals.
The confused phone call. The lost referral. The extra click in the chart. The doctor staring at a screen instead of the face across the table.
These are warnings. We treat them as noise.
Leadership is hearing the warning siren. Not waiting for the building to burn down to call the fire department.
Name It
What struck me wasn’t the anger. It was the clarity.
Everyone knows the rules are stupid.
Patients shouldn’t carry records. Prices should be upfront. Delay should be rare. Doctors should prescribe, not plead. Jobs shouldn’t exist just to plug holes in a leaking bucket.
The problem isn’t vision. The problem is apathy.
Normalization is a drug. It makes you sleep. It teaches you to blame yourself for not understanding the game. It teaches clinicians to hack the system instead of fixing it. It teaches execs to manage the decay.
A system doesn’t break with a bang. It breaks with a sigh.
One workaround. One wait. One unexplainable bill.
One that’s just how it is.
Outrage is easy. It fades fast.
What we need is the opposite of numbness. We need leaders who refuse to accept the current state as inevitable.
Ask a hard question.
Would you let your mother jump through these hoops?
If the answer is no, stop designing systems for strangers. Design for family.
