Health

So, it looks as though the democrats will have lost the senate seat long held by Kennedy. Fantastic. Be it cynical and hypocritical or whatever, but it seems republicans have been able to capture the zeitgeist; people being generally pissed off at big institutions getting bail outs while the ordinary folk. They have a point. However, thinking that republicans are out for the ordinary folk is just silly. That's another post.

This loss could very well affect the outcome of the health care legislation going through the sausage factory in DC. I'm not even going to pretend that the bill was perfect, but it was a stab at it, and it would have provided coverage to the majority of folks who don't have it now.

So. It doesn't pass. What exactly are we left with? There seems to be consensus that there needs to be some kind of change in how we manage our health care in this country, as if we don't we'll most likely end up broke faster than we're most likely going to end up anyway. I'm not going to dig out stats, but generally as a populace in comparison to other western hemisphere democratic nations, we pay more for our health care than they do only to get middling service. (Look up our rankings for infant mortality, for example.)

I don't believe the solution is to say "let the insurance companies and the markets handle it."What a croc. The markets are clearly rigged in favor of the providers, not the customers. We've been getting routinely shafted, and I definitely don't believe that the folks who are responsible for the situation are going to be able to give us any meaningful solutions.

Where could we go from here? Well, if the reform does fail, the first thing might be to work to bring costs down through finding efficiencies in delivering service. No more files and paperwork that doesn't get shared between insurance companies, but perhaps a central digital means of keeping patient information that every hospital and every clinic can read and change info on. With our health delivery system in the shape it currently is, there are so many ways to find efficiencies to save money. It's ripe for it.

We should also have a basic insurance people can buy that covers yearly preventative medical visits, which could catch deadlier sicknesses before they fully take hold. I'm fairly convinced that requiring everyone to get insurance will eventually lead everyone's prices to come down. People are required to insure their cars, so I'm not sure where the hoopla surrounding this comes from?

I guess I'm ranting here, but seeing the health care reform thing die is kind of frustrating. The people crafting the reform most likely did it to themselves because they are so friggin tone deaf and always have been. I wonder if an independent group could have come up with more effective suggestions.