e-Patient Dave is at it again. One half of the patient-physician duo I nominated for a 2009 Coolest People in Healthcare award is shaking up the healthcare status quo and calling for a change of leadership. Specifically, he wants to put a patient in charge in D.C., as he expands upon in a post for The Healthcare Blog. What’s most remarkable is I don’t agree with him.
We’ve had a lot of bad days during these 9 months or so of D.C. healthcare reform charades. Today could be the worst one yet. Policy wonks are celebrating like pigs in slop tracing the byzantine twists and turns of Monday’s last-ditch effort to pass reform and hypothesizing about all possible solutions and outcomes. Meanwhile those of us who are really affected by this gargantuan US healthcare mess are holding our heads in our hands. Let’s take a look at how we got here.
Not to belabor the issue, but the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, an excellent source of health policy analysis, has pubished a Health Affairs policy brief addressing the individual mandate. As you know, I’m not enthusiastically for a mandate under current “reform-lite” conditions. But long-term it will save us additional pain as private insurers would continue to use us as scapegoats for high costs if there wasn’t a mandate already.
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In the movie Avatar, the wheelchair-bound hero transforms into an avatar of himself that’s fully functional, taller, smarter, and a calming blue. It’s him, only better. What if arteries had avatars?
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