Over on Facebook, I'm embroiled in a great debate with a few of my friends. Some of us are in support of President Obama's efforts. Some are against it and a few have questions of both sides.
One of my friends mentioned David Goldhill's article in this month's Atlantic Monthly, How American Healthcare Killed My Father. I decided to track it down and read it.
I am so glad I did and you should too...
To keep this from being a "pithy" diary, I thought I would write a "review" of the article but there is really not much to review. Goldhill just tells it like it is.
I admit, that the article started me out with the impression that it was going to be all about Goldhill's father's experience. But about six paragraphs in, the whole tone and direction of the article shifts
I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.
Perhaps it's my management consulting background, but when I hear the phrase Underlying Cause, I get excited (geek? yes). I've come to recognize that everything is a System. And, unfortunately, many systems are so complex and intertwined that unless we step back and understand the whole, we each are like one of the blind men describing an elephant.
Goldhill has taken that step back and done an exceptional job of describing that elephant that is our health care system. And like any good Systems engineer, he identifies the the underlying causes, mostly rewards and incentives and how they work together to produce substandard care at superinflated prices.
There is much more in the article that I could go on about, but rather than see it through my eyes, read it yourself. Here's the link again.
ARB
(Special note: I copied and pasted the web printable version into an MS Word document. It is 22 pages. Please think of the planet before printing the whole thing and read it on your screen. Or, go to your local news stand an pick up a copy already printed in this month's Atlantic Monthly.)