Bill Bradley Content Series: Health Care

I was, as you might have guessed, a really naïve young adult.

As soon as I was off my parent's insurance, the reality of health care for the uninsured snuck up and smacked me in the face. Where I once paid $20 for a doctor's visit I was now paying $70, if I was lucky. All of those prescriptions that were once $10 were suddenly over $100. I couldn't afford my asthma inhalers. I had to talk my doctors into lesser prescriptions and smaller doses so that I could stretch it out as long as possible. I ended up with pneumonia. Twice.

After that, I briefly pursued training in the field of medical records and billing, fascinated by the inner workings of the health care system. Viewing the health care system for the side of the providers rather than the side of the patients made me realize that American health care as it is currently set up benefits no one-not the doctors, not the hospitals, least of all the patients.

The current American health care system is not designed for the poor or the chronically ill, and least of all for the poor chronically ill. Pre-existing conditions negate your chances for receiving adequate insurance coverage, and treatment for an acute trauma or serious illness can leave you bankrupt. Nor are doctors, who spend exorbitant amounts of money on malpractice insurance and ridiculous hours on shifts where they end up exhausted, drained, and more likely to make a mistake, well-treated by the system. Hospitals end up charging $10 for a tablet of Tylenol in order to make their ends meet.

And yet, everyone holds on to the status quo because sure, things are bad now, but couldn't they be so much worse?  

They could be-or they could also be better. In his book, The New American Story, Bill Bradley outlines several plans that could form the beginnings of a new American health care system. His point of order:  a "holistic" approach. This doesn't mean that he's advocating an alternative medicine-based system. Rather, he's saying that we can't treat the symptoms, we must treat the underlying causes. This is true for both the treatment of illnesses and for the treatment of the health care system. To Bradley, this means making preventative care just as important as treatment of chronic and acute ailments. More importantly, it involves making everyone responsible for the workings of the system-the administration, the physicians, the pharmaceutical companies, and the patients themselves.

It's an interesting reform theory, one that has a lot of merit but one what also brings up some definite points of contention. By applying responsibility to the patients, Bradley is asking that those who engage in high-risk behaviors-smoking, drinking, eating too much, not exercising, driving without a seatbelt on-pay more in fees than those who maintain proper health. What he does not address is whether things such as gym fees, detox programs, or smoking cessation materials will be available at a reduced cost, or whether they will have the possibility of being subsidized in order to encourage more participation in active preventative care.

Further more, he insists on a nationwide conversion to electronic medical records, citing their usefulness in cutting costs and medical errors. While this is true, the issue with an electronic medical record conversion is very rarely the administration's insistence on remaining with an antiquated paper system and more often a cost issue. To insist that all hospitals and doctors offices convert without offering a subsidy is to require the hospitals to divert funds from other programs to the implementation of the records, which will then also require an diversion of work force to adapting to the new system, potentially causing more errors and headaches during the transition period.

But while I have some issues with the details of Bradley's plan, I think his overall approach is a good one. He's correct when he says that we can't treat health care like any other commodity because it isn't. It is completely absurd to, as he quotes D. Ferrel Atkins from a letter to the New York Times as saying, "believe that [someone having a heart attack] would call emergency rooms for competitive prices before calling the ambulance." This requires a complete renovation of the way we view health care as a country. Reasonable health care is not a luxury but, as Bradley says, "a right."  Providing a government health care (a "Medicare for All," he calls it) or vouchers for health insurance (in a merging of right and left wing theory, he says) are both valid approaches that should be looked at in more detail.

We as a country will benefit from decent health care for all of our citizens, not just the ones who work in government or high-paying industries. How can we presume to be a global leader when 46 million ("more than all the people living in the following states combined: Mississippi, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona," Bradley writes on page 137) of our fellow Americans are without any form of health insurance at all? We're all paying too much for the failings of our health care system. It's now time to do something about it.