Health Care Reform And Carburetor Tweaking

[Joanne98]

What we call a “health care system” in America is by my standard a strange and almost incomprehensibly corrupt and twisted thing. The continued existence of such a cruel and dysfunctional system requires that a great deal of mind-fogging fairy dust be continually thrown in our faces by the health care industry and the politicians they own. At all costs, they must inoculate us against the possibility that a spontaneous outbreak of common sense might infect the populace. Rest assured that the strategists for the drug and insurance companies understand what they are up against.

They understand that to keep in place a fundamentally irrational system, they have to maintain an eternal vigilance to prevent dangerous principles like logic, reason and fairness from entering into the healthcare equation. The ‘industry’ must make for-profit medicine seem normal, acceptable, and our only reasonable option. They must also make the kinds of publicly funded healthcare systems operated by most every other nation on the planet seem weird, subversive and dangerous.

Much of the vacuous banter about “healthcare reform” that appears in the press and in speeches by our politicians seems designed to be both boring and to make healthcare issues appear very complex. Health insurance, in concept, is really not a devastatingly difficult thing to understand.

Here’s how it works: The insured pool their resources so that when any of them get sick the pool pays for their care. The pool must also pay the system’s administrative costs. This is the comprehensive list of essential elements.

It only seems so simple because it is.

Most of the complications involved in “reforming” our present system can be traced back to its fundamental design defect. We place a huge burden on our health care system by demanding that “profit” be extracted from its operation. It is this design characteristic that twists, perverts and distorts the very notion of health care in America.

It seems obvious that the first goal of a “health care provider” should be to give the best possible care to those that are “provided” for. Just as obviously, we can see that in our for-profit health care system, delivery of actual care is a side effect.

Is there really any question that a “healthcare” system that allows insurance companies to deny coverage to people on the grounds that they may actually need medical care is one that has been hideously deformed, diverted and subverted? It might be more accurately described as a “profit delivery” system.

But to the dismay of those that are committed to spreading fairy dust, every healthcare system creates a product that can be examined. According to the World Health Organization, our nation ranks 37th in the world in quality of care, placing just below Costa Rica and Dominica. Our system now leaves about 50 million people without access to even basic medical care.

But we are number one, and by a large margin, in cost of medical services, executive compensation, and percentage of healthcare dollars spent on administrative overhead. Without a generous quantity of fairy dust, a phony debate in the corporate media, the complicity of a bought-off Congress, and a new President whose words support reform but whose timid, incremental approach will likely only diminish the possibility of systemic change, the inexcusably lame performance of our health care system would be recognized for what it is: intolerable.

Imagine your car came in 37th in the race, after you dropped more money than anyone thought possible on the most expensive model that was available. If you really wanted to win, wouldn’t it be best to pay attention to the fact that all 36 of the much faster cars that beat you in the race use an engine design that is completely different from yours? What if you discovered that the other cars, in addition to being faster, used only about half the fuel your car burned?

Would you then go home and tinker with your carburetor in the hopes that a little tweaking would somehow overcome the poor performance that results from the basic design of your machine? Or would you consider it obvious that your only chance to compete successfully would be to replace your obsolete and incredibly expensive racecar with one that has been designed to deliver a higher level of performance?

When it comes to healthcare, President Obama seems to support the carburetor-tweaking approach. According to an article by Bill Moyers, Obama was asked at a town hall meeting a couple of weeks ago about the possibility of switching to a single-payer national health care system. He said that single-payer might “make sense” but only if we were “starting from scratch” to build a new health care system. Obama says our current for-profit healthcare system is “too large a percentage of our economy” to consider changing.

Continued>>>
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/health-care-reform/

[izquierdista]

1. Tweaking = change you can believe in

You have to imagine that you have no clue that you are 37th in the race, that half of your pit crew is shouting "we're #1, we're#1", and your sponsor is telling you that he will buy you a better car next year.