Anything large usually has many contributing factors, but I can see at least a few ways that the overreaction to Covid has contributed to worse healthcare today and for many years to come.
> One of the biggest causes of health problems in America is excess weight, and officials tried to scare healthy people to do nothing other than sit at home for a time, which caused a lot of people to gain weight they otherwise wouldn't have and caused a lot of future problems that should have been prevented. As a small anecdote to illustrate this, the local government here chained up the outdoors playground and gymnastic equipment to prevent people from exercising. This was the McNamara fallacy applied to healthcare in its purest form.
> A lot of basic healthcare shut down for a long time. So not only was there a normal healthcare backlog, but when issues were finally caught later on, they might have been far worse at that time than they otherwise would have been. I'm sure this has an ripple effect on the future.
> Some healthcare professionals lost their careers over vaccine mandates. Anecdotally, I know a Doctor that had a very bad reaction to the first Covid vaccine and was still forced to choose between subsequent doses or lose his career. And I know many people have been discouraged from entering the healthcare field because of this loss of bodily autonomy. Certainly, a greater supply of doctors and nurses would help ease any healthcare shortages.
> This is harder to illustrate with any kind of data, but I think a lot of normal civil society has broken down because of the unnecessary disruption from Covid. People are less pleasant, less accepting of their neighbors, more impatient drivers, more stressed out, etc. I think this is the kind of thing that has some overall health impact on the community as a whole. I acknowledge that it's almost impossible to measure this point in an objective way.