By JOE FLOWER
The reform isn’t perfect, but maybe it’ll help us avoid disaster.
The rapidly ramifying crisis in health care may (we can pray) end all delusions. It may at least begin to weaken them by exposing them to the light, to the sobering effects of reality.
The reform act has not brought us to the Promised Land. By bringing us access without capacity, fierce restrictions coupled with vague language and loopholes, mandates coupled with fines low enough to become the cheap way out, strong new ideas that are only pilots, and tough commissions and task forces that have no teeth, the reform act delivers us into a period of maximum melee, in which the needs and desires of hospitals, doctors, citizens, politicians, insurers, drug companies, device manufacturers and hundreds to thousands of niche industries within the sector, get pitted nakedly against one another.
Everyone in this melee will increasingly be driven by the ratcheting drumbeat of cost, cost, cost—which is another word for over-use of resources.
It can seem at times like a kind of existential madness. But in fact we are engaged in a struggle over the very meaning and substance of who we are, what we do and why we do it. We can hope that at last and increasingly, we will be shedding our delusions and engaging in that struggle on the basis of some kind of reality.
Stupidity Everywhere
You know the facepalm moment. It’s that moment when you smack your hand on your forehead, accompanying the concussive thwap with the expletive of your choice, when confronted by a bit of numbskullery so dense as to tear the space-time continuum.
