What This Is For

Rural healthcare finance and operations doesn’t generate a lot of clear-eyed writing. The people who understand the mechanics are CFOs and billing directors who don’t write publicly, and the people who write about rural health tend to work at the policy altitude, without much interest in what actually happens when a critical access hospital decides to cut a service line or transfer a patient it could have treated. This is an attempt to write about those mechanics: healthcare systems, operations research, statistical modeling, and the unglamorous infrastructure that determines whether a frontier community keeps receiving care at home.

The first real post will be an honest accounting of a decade in the cannabis industry. Less a rant than an autopsy of what happens when an industry organizes itself around resisting measurement, because measurement would undermine the authority of people whose expertise is essentially vibes-based. There’s a reason I ended up in engineering, and that decade is part of it.

The skepticism is aimed at the industry and its mystique layer, not at the people who use cannabis. Especially not in communities like the ones I work in now, where it functions as real harm reduction against far more destructive alternatives. The honest harm reduction argument and the skepticism about “it’s medicine” claims are actually the same argument, since both require telling the truth about what the product is.