Atlantic Monthly just published an 11,000 word essay that can be found on their site, "How American Health Care Killed My Father"
It was written by a businessman who was motivated by the death of his father due to hospital negligence, in spite of his incurring over a half a million dollars in bills, paid by the largest existing "public option" medicare.
It's easy to describe the failures of our country's health care system, and you could almost squeeze the litany into that thirty second limit if you talk fast. But the solutions, getting from here to "there," whatever your chosen there happens to be is another story; a much longer more elaborate one.
I've written several diaries here about this subject, and they are always pessimistic. So while I and the author of the Atlantic Article, David Goldhill, agree over the vastness of what must be changed. Rather than considering it impossible, he acknowledges that it cannot be done by a single bill, which he, like I feel very well could make things worse. He says that the kind of change he is talking about must be done over the course of generations.
Some things, such as forming the meta paradigms of the scientific method, principles of ethics, religions, bodies of secular law and medieval cathedrals...are built over generations. A national health care system in a democracy is driven not by faith, or protected the academic freedom of the intellectual elite, but rather it is shaped by the immediacy of elections, influenced strongly by interests benefiting from the status quo.
In that respect, electoral democratic politics is inherently conservative, militating against fundamental change. We have no meaningful radical party in the United States. There was a time when there was a Socialist Party, and even a Communist party that had a slight effect on the direction of national policy. They were not at the table, but were a looming threat that shaped policy.
The current probable form of this Health Care Reform law will be enhancement of private insurers by a semi universal mandate, with a weak public option, that will not have the capacity to challenge their supremacy.
On this site we have our list of enemies who are preventing passage of groundbreaking reform. The Republicans have their list of objections, some being imagined horrors of fantastic origin, while others do a loose connection with reality. Both of these parties, the two effective choices of Americans, keep to the thirty second rule in articulating their positions.
The tragedy is that we have a system that has evolved over decades based on a resolution of forces of the diverse values that shape our society. The health care "mess" is an uniquely American product, the result of thousands of compromises at the federal and the state levels, where regulation now is based.
Our thirty second attention span means we, our society, those of us who are not CEOs of Health Care Entities or otherwise benefiting from the megalithic "system" are, in effect, using pea shooters against a fortress.
I wrote this diary, Health Care in the World of Tomorrow that describes a changing social norm, invisible, rarely articulated, that underlies many of the pathologies that are actually being reinforced by the present legislation.
The Atlantic Article included the same point, which is unrealistic expectations fostered for "health care," However, these will only be pea shooters, not because they lack merit, but because there is no "special interest" that will gain if it is followed.
We are no longer a people who read tomes, long carefully articulated discourse that promotes a goal that requires great commitment and change. The thirty second attention span, and its complement, the thirty second sound bite, are the great equalizer. With these, the social insight, base on verified research, become equated with the trivial slogan based on illusion.
Those who master this simple truism of our national attention span contraction, and who possess the energy and talent to capitalize on it, can gain fame, fortune and power. Those who don't may get a long article published in Atlantic; but more often write diaries like this in Dailykos.
Both, I suggest, with equal impact to the ultimate outcome.