I am spending the day at the hospital with a family member that had surgery yesterday. This is a very highly ranked hospital. The nurses seem to be wonderful and the doctors are top notch. Still….
Some of the practices seem so old fashioned, so out of an era before high tech. I am waiting for Florence Nightingale to come into the room. All around me I hear beeps and buzzing from equipment – how anyone sleeps in hospitals I don’t know. Wires and tubes are everywhere, constantly in the way of something a doctor or nurse is trying to do. Patients ring for nurses that are busy with paperwork – literally paper that requires handling. The nurses try.
I have to hold a cup to my relative’s mouth so that she can drink from a straw. I wonder why they don’t have children’s cups with lids and built in straws that patients could turn every which way without spilling, meaning they could drink when they want. And why do you have to put a patient through the pain, and in some cases the risk, of rolling over? Could someone fashion a lift that would raise a patient a couple of inches off the bed or roll them over? It can’t be that difficult.
Why in a 21st century hospital does it take 90 minutes from the time the doctor tells a patient that he is going to order a new pain medication to the time that medicine is given to a patient – that is on what they call “Stat,” a term that I believe means, roughly, “Hurry it up!” The drive-through window at the bank has a pneumatic tube system to deliver materials to and from the teller, why not the hospital pharmacy? Or why not a miniature high-speed rail system to carry goods around the hospital? Answer: Cost (including tax) and regulations.
As I work on this post Congress is debating a plan to pay for healthcare by taxing people that earn more than $200 thousand. This approach may make healthcare benefits available to more people (I believe the opposite is true, but that’s a different post) but it won’t do much to drive more money and more innovation into healthcare. To get that, we need to cut taxes and cut regulations to spur our economy. As a nation we seem completely unwilling to try that.
I have talked to many people that insist that we have already tried the free market approach. I have never succeeded at getting any of these folks to tell me when in history we tried free market healthcare. Maybe you know, but if your answer is sometime before the 1960s please don’t bother. That’s ancient history in medicine. And please remember that before the mid 1990s doctors and hospitals couldn’t even advertise. Many drugs require a prescription and always have, and insurance through our employer (the not portable kind of insurance) came about because of taxes.
I write often about enabling people to take care of themselves, and to earn more money. The answer to healthcare is not to make the wealthy among us pay for our care; the answer is to dramatically expand the economic pie so that more people can pay for themselves. Perhaps what we really need is a dramatic tax cut for those earning more than $200 thousand (not this blogger!). That would stimulate the investment we need to create an economic stimulus that would increase opportunities for those that can’t afford healthcare right now. The dramatic economic stimulus would help us all to fund care for those that – all too many people – lost their healthcare when they got very sick and needed insurance.
Instead of taking an aggressive effort to make the United States economy more dynamic and our citizens more self reliant and accomplishment oriented, we are pushing healthcare to the lowest common denominator; moderate care for everyone. Moderation in healthcare and in life – tax the achievers – punish achievement.
Despite the shortcomings I wrote about above, my relative is getting better thanks to excellent healthcare. Congress is working hard to end healthcare excellence and doing nothing to address its shortcomings.
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Due to the tremendous cost dollars being tossed around, it is encouraging that congress is at least taking it’s time to look at all sorts of issues, and not try to blast and pass something so near and dear to everyone so quickly. It’s discouraging that they will not look at all cost reduction options (e.g., obama says tort reform doesn’t work, a code for trial lawyers business as usual).
Until better details come out, I’m holding off on ranting for or against. I am just glad that my 83 y.o. mother is getting knee replacement surgery and rehab this year, and not next year.