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Healthcare Illusionists: Why Tech Fantasies Can’t Replace Good Policy
- Mehdi Khaled
- Aug 13, 2025
- 4 min read
Over the last two decades, the story of children's health in the United States has quietly but profoundly changed - and for millions, it’s for the worse. Reading through the findings from recent landmark studies, one can’t help but picture not just numbers and percentages, but real families, worried parents, and children trying to make sense of the world around them.
Both the comprehensive 2025 JAMA study on US children’s health and the Commonwealth Fund’s 2025 State Health System Scorecard bring the same troubling message: a broad-based decline in child and youth health. This crisis reaches from our tiniest infants to our older teens, cutting across every region, income, and demographic line.
The JAMA research draws from a massive trove of data - from government mortality statistics, electronic health records, and multiple national surveys. Through this careful lens, it’s not just an isolated issue we see, but a landscape of decline: compared to 2007, today's children face sharply higher risks of chronic illnesses, mental health troubles, obesity, sleep difficulties, and even early puberty. In doctor’s offices, cases of anxiety, depression, developmental delays, and limits on physical activity are all on the rise. The story is personal - a child struggling with asthma and school absences, a teen facing loneliness and sleepless nights, a family wrestling with a new autism diagnosis.
What may hit hardest is that behind each grim statistic lies a preventable tragedy. The US, despite all its resources, now sees mortality rates for children under 20 that are nearly double those of its international peers. Infant deaths from prematurity and sudden unexpected infant death, and youth deaths from firearms and car crashes, mark American children’s experience as uniquely perilous in the developed world.
The Commonwealth Fund’s 2025 Scorecard echoes these findings with a wider lens, looking at not only outcomes but the structures and policies shaping them. It documents a country where, since 2018, infant mortality rose in 20 states, and avoidable deaths have gone up even as these numbers fall elsewhere. Black children and teens, in particular, face alarmingly higher risks - evidence of deep, persistent inequities. Disparities between states are stark: a child in West Virginia faces more than twice the risk of dying young compared to one in Massachusetts.
Neither study shies away from the why. The causes are not mysterious, and they are not the fault of individuals - they’re systemic (= policies or lack thereof) and social. These studies speak to the harmful weight of poverty; the toll of gun violence and substance use; crumbling investment in public health and prevention; gaps in insurance and medical care; a society where too many kids face isolation, hunger, uncertain housing, and inadequate mental health support. Yet, in the face of this overwhelming adversity, a new breed of techno-politicians is making increasingly bold claims that emerging technologies will somehow reverse America’s deteriorating healthcare indicators. Let’s be honest: the real driver behind these claims is the same force that got the US healthcare system into this mess in the first place - money.
The recent announcement by RFK to prioritise prevention was a welcome headline. But here’s the rub: as a lawyer with limited experience in science and technology, his approach is shaped by fundamental blind spots in both areas. So, let’s set the record straight: widespread adoption of wearables has not improved any critical health indicator, anywhere on the planet. If there’s a trial proving otherwise, it’s set to take place in another galaxy.
You simply cannot have a sustainable health and care system in a country that refuses to address gun violence and chooses not to invest in sound public policy
Meanwhile, the elaborate lengths US techno-politicians go to distract from actually solving the root causes of the country’s shattered healthcare system can only be matched by their historic inability to enact real gun reform. After the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, Australia implemented a sweeping, bipartisan gun ban law virtually overnight - and hasn’t looked back. The US, on the other hand, has allowed special interests and political infighting to stall any meaningful action, leaving the country stuck with the highest rates of gun violence and mass shootings in the developed world.
At its core, today’s United States is a caricature of what happens when lawmakers, motivated by salaries and commercial interests, choose to ignore the impact of good policy on public health. The numbers speak for themselves: record spending (now nearly 20% of GDP) delivers lower life expectancy, higher maternal and infant mortality, and millions uninsured or underinsured. It’s a system built to profit a few, not to keep the many healthy.
You simply cannot have a sustainable health and care system in a country that refuses to address gun violence and chooses not to invest in sound public policy. Health tech will never fix the foundational flaws of the US healthcare system - but it will keep making the tech bros richer. Stargate is a fun story, sold by people who have never seen a well-functioning public healthcare system, and have no clue how to build one. Spoiler alert - here’s what’s on the other side of this US-healthcare gate: Deception.
Final advice to any US lawmaker with non-broken ethical anchors: lobbies are a form of legalised corruption, focus on policies and make evidence-informed laws. Tech will follow, instead of dictate and your health indicators will thank you.
The other way round is a dead-end. Literally.
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