Newsletters
A Compassionate Health Care System; January, 2010
With the changes that will likely occur in our political decision-making as a result of last week’s election in Massachusetts, all sides are taking a “regrouping moment” to determine the direction and impact this event will have on reforming the health care system in our country. The media, scholars, academics, and pundits are spending a lot of time to figure out “what happened?” What were the issues or sequence of events to result in the election of a Republican candidate in a state that is typically very pro-Democrat? Was it a vote against health care reform? Was it a vote against the Obama Administration? Was it a vote against the broader Democratic platform? Or, was it a vote for a qualified candidate who was able to connect and communicate more effectively with the citizens of the state in relation to what they want, and nothing more. Or, was it something else entirely?
For whatever reason, the most immediate and visible outcome of the Massachusetts Senate election has been putting the brakes on the health care legislation that was barreling toward the finish line. There will be many other outcomes as a result of the Massachusetts election, health care reform is just the most visible one today. Whether we liked the product that was produced as a result of this legislative process or not, we were heading toward a significant restructuring of our health care system primarily through a reallocation of the funding of health care, not by restructuring the inefficiencies and relationships that exist today.
It now looks as if the attempt primarily designed by the Democratic majority, may be heading in the same direction so many efforts ended-up before them- from Teddy Roosevelt in the past to Barrack Obama today. Maybe the idea put forward by T.R. Reid in his book The Healing of America explains this event best, “. . . the business of providing and paying for Americans’ medical care is so complex and involves so much money that significant change is politically hopeless.” The political carnage that was created along the way has led citizens to trust the health care system even less than they did before and politicians even less than that. The problem we were facing in the beginning still exists. The costs of the health care system we have today are unsustainable for the future.
