I just finished reading Steven Brill’s new book, America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, And The Fight To Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, and I’d like to share what I learned about the political and economic history of the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare).
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Disrupted Physician 
I have read Brill’s book, ABP.
One of the most significant takeaways is the Obama, healthcare provider, Insurance writer, PhArm connection. The fundamental crisis remains after tens of thousands of pages constructed and construed thru backdoor politics, lawyer-driven code speak and false information dispensed to the public.
The confluence of these factors has now delivered a broken system that in final analysis threatens to bring not only loss of lynchpin confidence in our medical profession but sadly loss of the care most (NOT ALL, I know) of us need and were given in the past. Yes, we were. In hind site this will become clear to even the nonbelievers. The fundamental crisis is and will be the burden on the individual. Yes, that is correct. And Brill eloquently outlines and fills in the text to explain just how we remain the burdened party.
How can that be? Let me say if you never have heard of the diversion game, ‘let’s keep them busy with minutia info and fear of catastrophe so we can hoodwink them ‘, then stop reading here and now. You are either in denial or as my mother would say, ‘wet behind the ears’.
Common sense dictates you can’t give a Rolls Royce to everyone even if you can afford it if they only can manufacture around 8,000 a year. It is largely a custom built car as well. Healthcare is expensive. Healthcare takes time to deliver. Besides these facts, healthcare must custom build a care plan for each individual patient even AFTER the standardized protocols are followed. Each health case requires expertise. Even the bandaid case. So, how can this be delivered within a system equitable? I can’t answer this question but I can say that what has been pawned off to us is NOT viable nor desirable for the most. Maybe a few will get the care. We have flipped the coin and it has the same face.
So, what have we as the consumer been left with? Empty promises. The media will boast with a lead story of the care given to the indigent family in New Mexico. We will have a family member who ends up purely by chance at a well run hospital just in the nick of time. Is that what keeps us in the black on a daily basis for our own personal story? Not if we want to be honest of what a whole populations’ need for care is and its administration. I have witnessed people who have seen by the same doctor for years be turned away at reception because the government issued plan is not taken. The doctor WOULD see them, but they would need to pay and then fight the insurance company. I have shopped insurance for a family member only to find that at her income level she will qualify for little more than survival medical help.
Citizens deserve a quality of care respective of the quality of life they enjoin here in the USA. But how we deliver that care ought to be in accordance with what is affordable to THAT citizen. Does it make the country feel any better if those who make more money get less or worse care? The person who is on food stamps and struggling to pay rent can only hope as do those who can afford premiums right now this class war game of ‘keep them busy’ stops soon.
The fix is not on the horizon. Single payer systems are dying in England and Canada. Let’s take Brills’ proposals to heart and see if we can heal this ailing system before we come to a tipping point that places most individuals in peril.
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