Opposition to Health Care Reform

As nearly as I can tell, the issue on the table is not about health care delivery so much as about health care payment.  Those concerns are related in so far as the current consumer of services—the customer for health care—is not the patient but the payer.  The Health Care Delivery System is geared toward the needs of the insurance companies and the government (Medicare and Medicaid) not to the people who are sick or injured.

You suggest that people are opposed to altering this system.  It seems to me the problem is not that people oppose reform of the system, but that the reforms don’t actually address the problems most of us encounter with the system.  The barriers we face to health care reform at this point are from the political system itself, not from the issues we are trying to address.

One major feature of the political system that is clogging up the debate is the tendency to adopt a stance and then vilify anyone who doesn’t hold to it, rather than promote the qualities a particular stance would create.  For example, the “death panels.”

Some advocates want people to have as a part of the services they receive which are considered to be health care, support for making end of life decisions.  These are complicated and have huge implications for how we spend the last days of our life and what sort of legacy we leave (Do I want to give the gift of sight by leaving my corneas?).  Somehow this gets turned into the notion that a government bureaucrat, worse, a team of government bureaucrats will decide what services a given person may have at the end of life.  This is a straw man.  It doesn’t promote the conversation, it shouts down those we have turned into opponents.

From my point of view, how we have the conversation is as important as what we talk about.  So my hope for our conversation is that we get to the issues in a manner that respects the integrity of those who see things differently.