Deez Interviews: Meet the healthcare reporter who's breaking it down for the average joe (that's us!)
Hope you’re enjoying the new Substack lewk and destination (spread the gospel it’s deezlinks.substack.com!!). This week’s interview is Emma Court, who confirms that yes, healthcare is a S-C-A-M of breathtaking bureaucracy, and no, you’re not the only one who doesn’t understand it, either.
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The interviewee: Emma Court (follow her @emmarcourt)
The gig: Healthcare reporter at MarketWatch
// You’ve been covering healthcare for almost three years now — what makes it a unique beat, and what do you enjoy most about it?
A lot of people who write about or work in health care have a story about how they got started; often (and unfortunately) it began with them or someone in their lives getting sick.
I more just stumbled into it. I had been covering a lot of local news, both where I went to college and in Dallas and Miami, writing a lot of features, and had moved on to politics in D.C. when this job came around. In retrospect, though, I can see how all those subjects fit together really nicely.
Health care is a local story, a political/policy story, a story of big business — health care spending makes up almost 20% of the U.S. economy! — and ultimately, a very personal story too. It affects all of our lives really intimately, and especially in times of crisis.
The tension between the latter two, the impersonal-seeming business side of healthcare and how at the same time it is always extremely, deeply personal, is what I find most interesting and compelling about the beat.
I try to draw that out in my reporting and writing. For example, we generally agree that companies making valuable products should be able to make a profit off that. But with drug prices, hospital prices, whatever, the question then becomes: how much money can you or should you make when peoples' lives hang in the balance?
// Who’s your specific audience?
When MarketWatch began in the late 1990s, it was pretty revolutionary. Here was this new website with news about the stock market, updated in real time, and available to anyone without a subscription. Think about how different that is from getting your print newspaper every day with news about what happened that day in the markets, or even from the Bloomberg Terminal, which has that kind of real-time information but access is really expensive.
We're still writing for a similar audience today: the little guy/gal, basically. Someone who is investing on their own, whether through individual stocks or say, exchange-traded funds, as opposed to a giant company, bank or fund, which is doing much larger trades.
But we also write a lot of more general news that isn't focused directly on the stock market, including our great personal finance team's coverage. What I write can be for either that markets-focused audience or a more general audience, and that balance can be tricky to strike on a day-to-day basis.
Either way, I try to think of someone who is confused — either by their health benefits or navigating the health system or investing in these huge, really complex health companies — and write for them, from there.
// If you could have a year to work on any longform feature you wanted, what would you write about?
Oooh, I love this question. Something I have wanted to do for a long time is write about what it's like to have an expensive disease, whether it's an ultra-rare disease that most people never hear of in their lifetimes, or a more common disease that is still really expensive to have and disabling. I would want to spend a lot of time just following someone, or a few people, around and learning about what it's like, how expensive it is, how stressful.
And I think what I would probably find, from reporting about conditions like migraines and this rare disease called Duchenne muscular dystrophy is: Basically, if you get really sick, your best hope is to have a lot of money.
Even in the best case scenario, if you have health insurance, there are a lot of expenses that it won't cover, and you devote a ton of time just to navigating all the bureaucracy, let alone going to all your medical appointments. Now, even drugs that are covered by insurance can cost thousands of dollars out-of-pocket. The U.S. healthcare system can really leave people in these situations high and dry. And people don't always know about that until they or someone they know are in that situation.
// What's one major misconception about healthcare you see millennials — who are all now starting out and figuring out dafuck deductibles are — struggling with?
Basically, everything, to be honest. There's just no guidance whatsoever about how to even start, whether it's how to choose a health plan, find a good doctor or therapist, or how to argue an incorrect bill. And then you're learning how health benefits work basically one day at a time, hundreds of dollars at a time; one argument with the insurance company/pharmacy at a time.
So you make mistakes, and get fleeced, and spend too much money, and hopefully you learn. But it really seems like there should be a better way.
// Finally, what's a recent article that you're proud of, and why?
I wrote a cool piece recently about how venture capital and private equity funds are investing in doctor's practices, and how that is hurting patients. The trend is very common in dermatology, where doctors report being pressured to sell products to patients and even meet production numbers for procedures, which is really scary.
But they also told me that there's a lot of pressure for nurse practitioners and physician assistants to do procedures that dermatologists should really be doing, and often this is happening without supervision — resulting in all kinds of medical mistakes, like misdiagnosis, too-invasive procedures being performed, too many biopsies being done. This all affects patients, of course. And as a patient, you don't always know a PE/VC firm is involved. The doctor's office may look exactly the same to you as it did before.
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And on that chilling note...have a great, or at least very informed, weekend, Deezers!
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