Medicine & Humanity

"US health system reform--what's missing?" Humanity

POSTED MAR 25, 2012 AT 05:44 PM, EDT BY MELISSA WALTON-SHIRLEY

I don't know the identity of the physician that stood at the microphone at the end of this presentation, but he hit the nail on the head. "Healthcare is a basic human right," he said; which raises the question, "If the right to healthcare is so basic, why is it so problematic?" When there's trouble in any country, it most usually has to do with the age-old struggle to balance the supply of cash with the demand for services, but that is a woefully inadequate summation. Like any complicated and dying patient whose symptom complex is driven by not just one, but two or even three different disease processes, so are the maladies of healthcare reform in our country. Following suit like a successfully metastatic cancer, those who seek to destroy the good things about our system are attacking simultaneously, at every vulnerable site, repeatedly and efficiently. Make no mistake, as a group of individuals, we as healthcare providers are vulnerable.

I read every page of the healthcare reform bill and posted on that issue a few years ago. I lamented that the word "cardiologist," the gatekeeper of the our country's most expensive DRGs, congestive heart failure the most damning, was never mentioned one single time in the entire diatribe. Congestive heart failure was never mentioned as an entity, period. Although trauma networks were addressed, PCI networking, a smoke-free America, and effective strategies for heart-failure prevention and readmissions were never mentioned. Behind what door were we all sleeping? Or more precisely, who was holding the door shut?/.../