Yes, American health care is an appallingly patched-together ship, with rotting timbers, water leaking in, mercenaries on board, and fifteen per cent of the passengers thrown over the rails just to keep it afloat. But hundreds of millions of people depend on it. The system provides more than thirty-five million hospital stays a year, sixty-four million surgical procedures, nine hundred million office visits, three and a half billion prescriptions. It represents a sixth of our economy. There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have.
via newyorker.com
The article is a bit on the longer side (no surprise, it's the New Yorker), but I really appreciate this perspective on how work with what we have in starting to improve the U.S. health care system. I particularly liked the historical comparison on how the health insurance systems in other countries (U.K., France, Switzerland) developed.
Of course, it's moderately awful that they started working on their health care systems 60 years ago, and that the U.S. is still a mess today, but still!
