We are adaptable creatures, and while that is generally good, sometimes it’s a problem. We have no difficulty taking prompt action when faced with a sudden calamity, like a bleeding head wound, say, or a terrorist attack. But we are not good at moving against the creeping, more insidious threats — whether a slow-growing tumor, waistline or debt.
It’s as true of societies as of individuals. We did not muster the will to reform our long-broken banking system, for example, until it actually collapsed in the Great Depression.
This is, in a nutshell, the trouble with our health care crisis. Our health care system has eroded badly, but it has not collapsed. So we do nothing...
more after the jump...
For at least two decades, polls have shown that most consider our health system seriously flawed. With family insurance premiums now averaging $12,000 a year, the insured fear it will become unaffordable, and businesses regard health benefit costs as their single greatest obstacle to competing globally.
People without insurance are proven to be more likely to die, and 28 percent of working-age Americans are now uninsured for at least part of a year. Emergency rooms, required to care for the uninsured, have become so full they turned away 500,000 ambulances last year. As a result, large majorities support the idea of fundamental change...
from Atul Gawande's commentary "Can this Patient be Saved?" NYTimes May 5,2007. (thanks to Donkey O.D. for sharing the full piece, which is otherwise on the payola-only section of the Times website).
The bolded section above (emphasis mine) is a pet peeve of mine -- we've put billions and billions into disaster preparedness and bioterrorism work in the past few years, and we've taken billions OUT of more insiduous killers like chronic disease programs, integral public health mechanisms, and such basics as housing, food, transportation, etc.
I'm a doctor at a county hospital and clinic in Los Angeles, where we mostly treat the uninsured, underinsured, or undocumented. We're the safety net hospital in the area. However, we've been packed to the brim and have had to say no to ambulances (channel them to other county or non-county emergency rooms) over and over and over again. Now that's what I call scary. Spillover from a safety net hospital.
Also -- the cost that Gawande mentions for health insurance for a family isn't overstated. Even in California, individual health plans are more than $4500 a year, and family plans are definitely more than $12,000 a year. And what's minimum wage, in California or in the U.S.? You do the math. (Obviously this cost is too high even for middle-class folks!) That's seriously messed up (refraining from using expletives). Where's our revolution, our demands for accountability, our demands for healthcare for all?
[Please see the new National Physicians Alliance blog for more physicians' stories! Share your comments there too!]