A pearl for healthcare policy from an unlikely source...

In this week's sound bites over the continuing dilemma of how to fix our most immediate issues surrounding money (not to be confused with what I feel is our most important issue needing to be addressed in this realm - GREED and the culture that spews, cultivates, and perpetuates it), our fearless and clueless dictator spewed something that I found to be quite profound...don't worry, he did not understand what we was saying, so we cannot give him full credit for its profundity. Speaking of the new bailout plan he said,

"[This is] not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it."

What a beautiful statement for a logical, sane, equitable, and efficient way to do healthcare - a national health plan. As in a single-payer system in which profit motives and perverse profit incentives no longer drive the care that is given and that which is with-held.

A single-payer solution to the quagmire that is our current, default national health plan -

Don't get sick, and if you do, remember that the only place where you won't get a door slammed in your face due to billing and insurance issues is the local emergency room

It is not an issue of taking over healthcare's free market so valued by the AMA, PhRMA, Insurance companies, hospital associations, and co-conspirators in the HIC (Health Industrial Complex). Instead, it is a move to preserve healthcare and the free market that supports it in the U.S., starting with the greater than 50% of dollars that come from public funds.

As a physician, I support a single-payer health plan because I see it as the clearest way to preserve the ethical and moral principles of the healing arts, and to do so in a way that saves us money while restoring these higher ideals back to the individual and collective healer-patient relationship

...no more 50 million left out in the cold, while three-piece-suited CEOs strike up conversation inside over what preventive health service to stop reimbursing next
...no more economics language where everyone is reduced to either "clients", "consumers," "purchasers," "payers" or "providers" of healthcare
...no more out-spending the rest of the world and having little to show for it except for high administrative costs and ridiculous wealth being raked in at the top
...no more "you deserve as much healthcare as you can pay for" and the other dehumanizing elements that ultimately lead to sicker lives and quicker deaths, reducing people and their healthcare to a commodity

I say, and probably for the first time on-record, yes to G.W...we need a drastic shift in how we see, operate, think about, and fund healthcare. Not to take it over, but to take it back, to preserve it, to put in place a logical systeming of rationing of what we spend and where we spend it to replace the current-day illogical, greed-based system of rationing that is 100% about dollars and 0% about the health of those residing in our country.


In health and beauty,
Anthony
Un-paid, self-appointed lobbyist for my patients