By KIM BELLARD

I’ve finally come to understand why the U.S. healthcare system continues to be such a mess, and I have President Dwight Eisenhower to thank.

I’ve been paying close attention to our healthcare system for, I hate to admit, over forty years now. It has been a source of constant frustration and amazement that – year after year, crisis after crisis – our healthcare system doesn’t get “fixed.” Yes, we make some improvements, like ACA, but mostly it continues to muddle along.

Then I learned about President Eisenhower’s approach to problems:

That’s it!  All these smart people, all these years; they didn’t know how to solve the problem that is our healthcare system, so they all took the Eisenhower approach: enlarge the problem.  Let our healthcare system get so bad that not addressing it no longer is possible.

If, indeed, there is such a point.

The actual Eisenhower quote is more nuanced than the above version. It was:

Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.

I guess we’re not yet at the point when the outlines of a solution are clear (Bernie Sanders notwithstanding). 

Instead, we’ve been chipping away at the problem, trying to make it smaller. For example:

• Employer-sponsored health insurance tax preference (WWII)
• Hill-Burton Act (1946)
• Medicare/Medicaid (1965)
• Federal HMO Act (1973)
• Stark Physician Self-Referral Law (1989)
• DGRs (1983) & RBRVS (1992)
• CHIP (1997)
• Medicare Modernization Act (2003)
• Affordable Care Act (2010)