Monday, December 14, 2009

Health care reform shorts:
Who is naughty? Who is nice?

health-care-processiion.jpg
Clergy lead procession in San Francisco calling for health care reform.

Over at Time Goes By, this morning Ronni Bennett pointed her community of elderbloggers to Atul Gawande's current New Yorker article on the cost control experimentation embedded in the health care reform bill. It's a very hopeful take on possibilities we might have missed. Do take a look.

What struck me immediately was that Gawande assumes that most physicians (and by extension others in the health professions)

want to provide good care ..."

I believe this is true. Oh, there are some specialists -- cosmetic surgeons come to mind -- who just want to take advantage of people's desperation for their own enrichment. But before they drowned in school debts, went through the professional hazing that is the residency system, and learned to think they deserved an inflated lifestyle, most doctors had in mind that they were going to do well by human beings.

The health care debate is about who lives and who dies and more and more doctors are among the good guys. You can find some of them at Physicians for a National Health Program.
***
So who's naughty? Today, it looks like Senator Joe Lieberman. He doesn't care who dies so he can feel important. Matt Yglesias describes the situation succinctly:

The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

The next few months and years will test whether the institutions of this country can overcome the sociopaths who inhabit choke points on progress and maybe even survival.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

When Clergy would have lead enough marches to stop wars launched by the US and would have lead enough marches to stop US support to Israel apartheid, and thus saved lives from US weapons, maybe then the People of the USA will have a chance to proper health care.