Healthcare as a Business : Broken Idea

I think of all the talk recently about the overhaul of the US healthcare system, one point made on Midmorning a while ago, sticks with me: when did people cease to be patients and become customers?

That's a question I'd dearly like to hear answered. I'm a patient, I am ill, I am going to a doctor/nurse/etc for care. I am not interested in buying healthcare services, I am interested in care. I don't want hospitals and other providers of care to be profit motivated.

Why? In all my reading and experience, anything that goes to profit motivation eventually falls into the myopic whims of idiots with more money than sense. Penny-wise and pound-foolish becomes the rule of the day. The enterprise self-destructs as if its management is some sort of insidious cancer. Best case example I can think of: ATT; not the current one, the old one. Read a bit on it.

In my own personal experience, all the nurses in my family (the good ones anyways), didn't get into nursing for the money, to service customers. They got in it to help make people better, or at least, hurt less.

I think the debate on this whole topic needs to be reworded. And the financial hand-wringers need to shut up. It will cost some in the short. But in the long, it will be cheaper as we all become healthier and need less treatment over time. We need to care for each other, to provide care to patients. We don't need to provide services. No options but a public option: sure, let the current companies manage the handling of paperwork and such, they already know how to do it.

I no longer want to hear free-market fantasies on healthcare. I don't care if the upper 1% can't get their third ivory back scratcher this year. The upper 1% has, by and large, never really "re-invested" or "created jobs". This is myth, pure and simple. They've "re-invested" just enough to keep their private, buffered and pampered life-style. You want proof: take a drive through the Hamptons, or Beverly Hills, or West Palm Beach, or Grosse Point, provided you can enter past the community gates.

0xDEADBEEF

Dismality

Dismal. That's a good word.

At the same moment where this country seems to be shaking itself loose of the authoritarian control, some ugly things are coming to light. Perhaps it is a sign that people are finally willing to speak up and say the Emperor not only is lacking garments, but has been skinned.

The gorram body armor.

Republicans, even after running a disastrous economic experiment not once but twice (Reagan 80s, Bush 2000s), still are sticking their fingers in their ears and going "lalalala, I can't hear you" (via Norwegianity).

Is it tragically hilarious, or hilariously tragic? Seriously? It's been 221 years (scratch that, 139 years (scratch the scratch: 89 years (scratch, scratch, scratch: 38 years))) since we got our voting on; we haven't gotten things figured out yet? Oh wait, I know what this is: when I was in grade school, it was called being a spoil-sport. Sheesh. And if the tables were the other way, I'd say the same thing. Every time we do this kind of thing, it makes our electoral process seem even more quaint and hokey and pointless if the judiciary is the final arbiter at the end.

Honestly, I'm not surprised we are moving them towards utilities. Let's just regulate them, okay? Under the auspicious title of "Utility", AT&T (the real one), gave you: radio astronomy, transistors, Unix and C, and on and on and on. Oh, and a phone that worked. I know people nearing their 70s that still need 10 or less fingers to count when that old Ma' Bell phone didn't work. And what did the breaking and deregulation give us? A series of re-merged, unregulated oligopolies that don't provide nearly the same things. I'm not saying it was all rosy with Ma', but we sure got a lot of neat things.

So, who knows? Frankly, I'm glad some of this noise is now percolating upward in the media stream. Amazing, really. Hopefully it becomes a torrent that leaves the truth in the plain, hard light of day.

Random thought: why the love of monarchies, royalty in general?

0xFEE1DEAD

Ah, November. How the hell did it get this late in the year? It feels like August was just a few days ago.

For those not in the US, you can safely ignore this post; unless you have some interest in our bizarre affairs, if so, enjoy your voyeurism.

In a few short days, millions of US citizens (sadly, probably still only a small fraction of all eligible voters) will wander to their polling place and cast votes using a myriad of different voting systems from the crude to the shoddy to the sophisticated. They'll get little stickers declaring 'I Voted'.

I wish I could feel less cynicism about the whole thing, but the whole system and past experience lead me to feel otherwise. It is all to easy to defraud the system, especially as time goes on and paper trails disappear.

I won't go into ugly detail of what the two possible outcomes may be; others have done it for me.

I'm a liberal sort of person. Don't get me wrong, I don't blindly vote for one of the major parties, I honestly do select on what I consider qualifications. I don't go in for the glorification of ignorance, for racism, for fear of the new and unknown.

All I will say is I feel a bit of dread. Next week could be very uplifting, or incredibly depressing. Regardless of what happens on November 4th, 2008, the world will keep spinning.