« love and hate | Main | contact »
September 03, 2009
just a show
I just watched The Daily Show with Betsy McCaughey as a guest. I have a few comments. First, I am an avid proponent of more patient advocates in the healthcare debate. However, Ms. McCaughey's mistake was not keeping the debate simple and factual. Government jargon is never going to work well on a TV show targeted to the twenty-somethings. The debate over the living wills and advance directives should have been directed over to when is it alright for a physician to provide counsel about these items. Should everyone over the age of 60 have one? Should everyone diagnosed with cancer have one? How about when you become an adult or even younger? When should the government dictate when you should start thinking about dying? Or, as Jon Stewart was trying to frame it, how much longer you should live?
Another topic during their debate concerned the medical protocols. Physicians are financially incentivized to follow standard protocols. I love protocols. Protocols protect people from stupid and lazy physicians. But, they also restrict the wise physicians to whom we hope our broken bodies will end up some day. We are just beginning the debate about standard care. For example, do we want our medical care to be a decision tree? What factors should come into consideration when making a standard protocol? If we trained physicians better and allowed more well-trained judgement calls, would we get better care? It has parallels with sentence minimums for judges. Nevertheless, we want to rush to make standard care a law or even to incentivize it even more?
Overarching issue in the healthcare debate is how much should the government be involved in an individual's medical care? What are the goals of the universal healthcare? To provide access, to provide cost control, to provide care?
I also want to draw attention on another example of government mandate, public education, and how well that has been working. I am proud to say I came out of public education but I also see not all are equal. BTW, what is the opportunity cost to other government programs if healthcare legislation gets implemented? All I'm asking is for more debate. Just my ramblings.
Posted by azileretsis at September 3, 2009 02:00 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)