Let’s put it out of our misery…..

 

(Image credit http://failblog.cheezburger.com/thereifixedit/)

I haven’t written for a while. Biggest reason for that is that life took over. One of these days, I’ll have life under control (yeah, right). I also haven’t been overly motivated to write. It’s not that I haven’t had ideas bouncing around my head, but none of them seemed to flow into a coherent thought stream that I could write down and not growl at the end result because it didn’t meet my standards (yes, believe it or not I do have them). This however, is something that won’t leave my mind.

There comes a time, when you are working on a project, that if you’ve made too many adjustments and/or corrections, you need to break the whole thing down and start over from scratch. I’m starting to believe that we, in this country, have hit that point with health care. We’ve been trying to make adjustments/corrections for quite a while now, and the end result bears no resemblance to either where we began, or the desired result.

We’re in the beginning stages of implementing the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare, as some would have it). The desired result (at least for those who’ve championed the legislation) is for health care to be accessible and affordable for everyone. It’s still rather early to determine if either component of the desired result is in reach, but I’ve got a feeling there are still a number of issues that need to be dealt with.

I’ve written about this issue before.  There are two common points of agreement (or maybe one depending on how you look at it) on this issue: 1) the current system is insufficient to provide affordable and accessible care for all. And 2) changes need to be made. Once you move beyond those two points, paths rapidly diverge. Is the focus on cost, or eligibility? Do we need to look at the care side of the equation, or the financial side?

I believe all of these areas need to be looked at, because there are issues in each of these areas. The problem, at least to me, is that each of these areas need to be addressed in the context of the other areas, but they’re not. They are each being addressed in a vacuum, as if each can be ‘adjusted’ or ‘corrected’ as needed without looking at the effect on the other areas. I think the reasoning behind such an approach is: we hope we only need to make minor adjustments in order to achieve the desired result. Perhaps we think it will be a ‘magic fix’. Whatever the thought process is, the end result is something that is unwieldy, cumbersome, and ineffective.

I realize what I’m putting forward may be extremely unpopular, but I truly think the system needs to be ‘blown up’. Ensure nothing of the previous system remains, and then start putting something completely new together. I’ll be completely honest, though.  I am not going to push this with a lot of energy, because until there is agreement on what the end result needs to look like, we’re going to end up with something that looks amazingly like what we’ve got now. I just don’t hold a lot of hope that the current crew in charge, or those that want to be in charge, would work on this in a way that is best for everyone.