Healthcare: we're missing the point
The problem with the healthcare conversation in this country is the way we make presumptions about what it is and should be. First and foremost, medicine has become a profit center for large corporations and the super rich. I heard a political pundit last Sunday suggest it's a problem that sick people are showing up at the doctor's office without healthcare insurance. There's never even a remote possibility that the patient might pay for services rendered. And that's a new dynamic that took hold in my lifetime. In 1958, when my mother gave birth to my oldest brother, the doctor and hospital bills combined equalled two weeks' of my dad's salary. That reveals two major changes in medicine in the last half-century: costs have tremendously outpaced inflation and the patient-as-the-payer model is dead. Secondly, health care professionals have resisted modern technology that would improve both the quality and accessibility of health care. In the tech and s...