WHY DO WE NEED TO INCREASE OUR "Best alternatives to a negotiated agreement" (BATNA) in Health Care Reform ?
Because if we don't, there is no "negotiation" only their DICTATION to us. They care not for human lives, only MONEY.
International travelers are familiar with the situation. Americans, stranded in a hostile healthcare environment, surrounded by dangerous, potentially life threatening practices, buy what is known as "Medevac insurance" that promises to literally pick them up and fly them away to the nearest civilized country for medical care, if they should suffer a life threatening emergency.
The cost, although high, is often nowhere near as high as the potential cost of inaction, of letting the local "doctors" and chiefs, perform their potentially dangerous rites, life draining "policies".
Local 'providers' are feared because they charge what they CAN, in an extremely in-elastic "free market".
To increase your negotiation power, increase your BATNA. Politicians have all the power, and people none. Politicians like that. People need to increase their BATNA.
Increasing our BATNA. (this piece about it is from Wikipedia, which is a better place to read it because there, it has live links)
Basically, BATNA proposes that in any negotiation, negotiators be prepared to take care of their needs via some alternative method. They should be able and willing to walk away from any bad agreement. Before negotiation - and in this case, until satisfactory resolution is found, which may take decades.
Drug reimportation was a powerful tool for BATNA, but of course, the extortionists could not allow that, they destroyed our hopes for that, in one of the clearest indications of what their real intentions are.
BUT, this is a potentially life threatening situation for millions of Americans. By making provision for alternative means of survival, even if it means for many, leaving the United states and thriving elsewhere, we each increase all of our BATNA. We must show them that they may need us, (as food?) but ideally, via smart thinking, we don't need them. Because UNLESS we do that, we will never get anything even marginally acceptable.
BATNA stands for "Best alternative to a negotiated agreement" and its described thus..
"In negotiation theory, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement or BATNA is the course of action that will be taken by a party if the current negotiations fail and an agreement cannot be reached. BATNA is the key focus and the driving force behind a successful negotiator. BATNA should not be confused with the reservation point or walkaway point.
A party should generally not accept a worse resolution than its BATNA. Care should be taken, however, to ensure that deals are accurately valued, taking into account all considerations, such as relationship value, time value of money and the likelihood that the other party will live up to their side of the bargain. These other considerations are often difficult to value, since they are frequently based on uncertain or qualitative considerations, rather than easily measurable and quantifiable factors.
The BATNA is often seen by negotiators not as a safety net, but rather as a point of leverage in negotiations. Although a negotiator's alternative options should, in theory, be straightforward to evaluate, the effort to understand which alternative represents a party's BATNA is often not invested. Options need to be real and actionable to be of value[1], however without the investment of time, options will frequently be included that fail on one of these criteria.[citation needed] A Program on Negotiation Executive Seminar experiment and other experiments have demonstrated that most managers overestimate their BATNA whilst simultaneously investing too little time into researching their real options.[citation needed] This can result in poor or faulty decision making and negotiating outcomes.
BATNA was developed by negotiation researchers Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Program on Negotiation (PON), in their series of books on Principled Negotiation that started with Getting to YES, unwittingly duplicating a game theoretic concept pioneered by Nobel Laureate John Forbes Nash decades earlier in his early undergraduate research."
What are some of your BATNA-increasing ideas.. What would you do now if you had a crystal ball, and saw the future, and saw that the politicians planned to lead us around in circles, indefinitely, until they lose to the GOP, making HCR their problem. And of course, nothing will happen then, either.
If you have a chronic illness, what do you need to do to insure your survival? How can you get better? How can you reduce your reliance on evil or expensive people? Can it be leveraged to help other people too?
If this seems a little fragmented, its because I'm not feeling well, and writing on a tiny laptop screen.