The Flexner Report – American Healthcare Chronicles

I recently started building products focused on healthcare affordability in the US. As I was ramping up on a new space, the biggest question that sparked my curiosity was: how did we get here? This question is the inspiration for this weekly series chronicling the decisions, accidents, and breakthroughs that built the US healthcare system. Across the last few posts, one institution kept appearing as the immovable object in American healthcare — the American Medical Association. They killed Truman’s universal coverage plan with a fabricated Lenin quote. They tried to shut down Kaiser’s shipyard health plan by barring his doctors from existing hospitals. They called both “socialized medicine.” To understand how a professional association accumulated that kind of power, we need to go back to 1910. To a report written by a man who had never treated a single patient in his life. In the early 1900s, American medicine was chaotic. Medical schools resembled today’s for-profit colleges. There…