Understanding the Health Care Crisis: The one-stop guide…
I've never quite understood our contemporary health care crisis, save "Health costs too much and employers/insurance companies/health care providers have an incentive to provide less of it because it costs too much." And even that insight comes fully digested from Sicko, admittedly one strand of a very complicated knot of issues.
Then I picked up last week's New Yorker. In it was a terrific article called "Getting There From Here" by Dr. Atul Gawande that outlines precisely what can and will need to happen to lift the American health care system out of the mess it's in. It contains no political agenda nor easybake maxims. Instead, the article is an elegant docent tour of the world's healthcare systems and the historical circumstances that brought about their creation. All dialectical roads then lead back to the same conclusion: Something as vast as a healthcare system must be reformed incrementally and not with the stroke of a pen. Too many lives depend on its functional existence, however poor, to hit the reset button. There is no do-over. There is only do-a–little-bit-bettter, as often and quickly as we can.
Dr. Gawande won't answer all your questions here (I still don't get why the single-payer ystem has this name. Who is the single payer? The government? You? Isn't just a nice way of not saying "government run") nor will he sratch your political itches with a screaming defense or condemnation. He has instead presented what we see too little of around this debate-perspecitve, thoughtfullness, calm–and why I hope is a sign of things to come.
Also:
- Dr. Gawande answers reader questions at New Yorker.com