18 What if West Coast Healthcare Got Focused? With Abie Flaxman

Pacific Time: The "What if...?" of West Coast Independence

What if we let the data guide West Coast healthcare? Could we better address our mental health and addiction crisis? In this episode, data scientist Abie Flaxman breaks down the top health issues for working-age adults on the West Coast—and why our health systems keep missing the mark.

You might think cancer or heart disease top the charts. But in Washington, Oregon, and California, the leading killers of working-age adults are drug overdose and suicide. In this revealing episode, Greg Amrofell talks with Dr. Abie Flaxman—one of the architects of the Global Burden of Disease—about what’s really harming West Coast health. From despair-driven deaths to broken public health infrastructure, the episode explores what data reveals, what state leaders can do, and why we can’t count on federal help. It's not just a health crisis. It's a crisis of policy, prevention, and purpose.

Highlights

• Why drug overdoses and suicides top the charts for working-age West Coasters
• How public health data from IHME can guide smarter state policies
• The hidden burden of Alzheimer's in Washington and California
• Why the Affordable Care Act mattered—and why it wasn't enough
• How state-level healthcare experiments can lead national reform
• What happens when the federal government guts public health budgets
• Why universities may need to take matters into their own hands to defend science

Guest Bio:

​Dr. Abraham D. Flaxman is an Associate Professor of Global Health and Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). He specializes in developing computational methods to measure health metrics and evaluate health interventions. Dr. Flaxman earned his BS in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization from Carnegie Mellon University.

Resources & References:

• Global Burden of Disease (GBD)
• GBD Compare | Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
• GBD US County Level Estimates
• Seattle scientists fight back against Trump cuts, disinformation | The Seattle Times

Related episodes:

• Ep 06: If American Healthcare is Broken, What Can the West Coast Do? With Mike Hanlon
• Ep 17: What if Higher Ed Started Over Again on the West Coast? With Dan Greenstein
• Ep 14: What If We Designed Cities for Joy? With Nolan Lienhart

Join the movement:

💬 Participate in active, civil conversations with your neighbors on the West Coast who are asking ‘What if…?’ Come to the community center for Pacific Time at Substack.

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