What If Healthcare Was Like Wikipedia?

By KIM BELLARD
Last week I wrote about, well, how awful social media has become, so this week it’s nice to write about pretty much the opposite: Wikipedia turned twenty last Friday (January 15).
In person years that’s not even old enough to buy alcohol, but in Internet years that makes it one of the grand old masters, like Google or Amazon. Wikipedia is one of the most visited Internet destinations, with its 55+ million articles, in 300+ languages, getting some 10b+ views per month.
It is something that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist, much less be successful. A non-profit, volunteer written/edited, online encyclopedia? An online resource widely trusted for its objective, generally accurate articles in a world of fake news? As the joke goes, it’s good that it works in practice because it does not work in theory.
That’s sort of the opposite of our healthcare system: it’s good … Read the rest