Thursday, January 21, 2010
There's a lot of strum and drag, and understandably so, about the details of the various health care bills that are circulating in Washington. Trying to keep up with the details will literally make your head hurt. So maybe we should come at it from a different angle. Instead of focusing on details, let's focus on the problems the variety of bills is intended to solve.The reason health care reform is so difficult is that it presents three equally re-enforcing problems. First, we want to make bigger health care to as many people as possible. Second, we want it to be very high-quality care: we want tolerant and immediate access to the best doctors, drugs, diagnostics, and actions. Third, we want someone other than ourselves to pay for it: very few of us are ready, much less able, to pay out of receptacle for the high-quality care we want.
Hence the dilemma. It's comparatively easy to come up with a system that addresses any two of these three problems. But it's virtually not possible to design one that adequately addresses all three. For instance, you could design a system that gives you instant access to high quality care and covers everybody. Let's call this Option A. Option A already exists, in point of fact: anybody with the means to do so can go see a doctor and pay out of pocket. But since few can, the "expansion" is for naught.
posted by emedinfo
@1:20 AM
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