Trying to Please Everyone and No One – part 2
Where is this train wreck headed? Wending its way through the various Senate and House subcommittees, the health care reform debate of 2009 is approaching a crescendo. What do we have to show? The question I posed in a previous post still has yet to be answered – just what is the problem? Is the problem greater access? Is the problem escalating insurance premiums? Is the problem stratospheric and ruinous hospitalization bills? Is the problem rapidly declining quality of care? Or is this simply become a matter of whose team wins? The bill fails — the president sinks.
Andrew Weil concludes:
But what’s missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what’s even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn’t fulfill its prime directive — it does not help people become or stay healthy.