Health Care Reform and the Individual

Two weeks back, ABC News hosted, “Questions for the President: Prescription for America”--that is, a Health Care Reform forum with our President Obama.

The president fielded, and vacillated himself through, a number of intentionally severalfold questions. These questions were posed by an array of individuals, representing the medical profession, patients, and just simple taxpayers.

The president attempted, struggling to maintain his notedly disarming ease throughout the evening, to assured his fellow Americans that this reform bears no similitude to big government bureaucracy.

The president reached to comfort some by downplaying their Orwellian anxiety, as he put it, “the whole big brother fear,” by playing up his usual soundbite: “[I]f you’re happy with your plan… you keep it.” Yet, a soundbite only simplifies the complexities of the world at the bastardization of reality.

Nonetheless, one audience member told of her 105-year-old mother and how five years back the mother came into need of a pacemaker.

The mother’s general physician was honest about the apparent unlikelihood of the procedure after one arrhythmia specialist claimed the patient was just too old, yet he sent the mother to another arrhythmia specialist. This specialist, however, taken aback by the mother’s “joy of life” agreed to perform the operation.

After this situational explanation, the questioner poised her query: “[I]s there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, quality of life? Or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?”

The president joked and bloviated through his response to finally conclude: we cannot “make judgments based on peoples’ spirit,” noting that to “be a pretty subjective decision.” Clarifying simply, he said, “[W]e have to have rules…”

However, when pushed by the same questioner, President Obama stated, “[I]f we’ve got experts… advising doctors across the board that the pacemaker may ultimately save money, then we potentially could have done that faster.” The potentiality of government efficiency has not been backed by the numbers and/or by history.

One cannot escape pondering, who shall these “experts” making these “rules” be?

The answer austerely remains the same even amongst Washingtonian doublespeak. These “experts,” no matter political titles, are bureaucrats.

How can this Health Care Reform be patient-based, when the individual is left out?

When the president claimed these decisions cannot be based on so-called subjectivity, he simply should have mentioned it as it is: decisions cannot bear on individuality.

However, no physicians cannot acknowledge that each patient comes with a different medical background, a different attitude, a different “quality of life.” This is where doctors, along with patients’ guidelines, make the final judgment based on these individualities.

What is lost upon advocates of this type of Health Care Reform is that all patients and doctors are making the cost-and-benefit analysis. When we outsource these analyses to government bureaucrats under compulsory laws, we cannot expect but to out-ship patients, as did Norway several years back, by sending patients to private, foreign hospitals.

“I don’t want bureaucracies making [the] decisions,” the president told the audience, “but understand… [the] decisions are already being made….” He cited that they are “being made by private insurers.”

The president fails jejunely to recognize the individual element. Individual patients are individual consumers in the health care market, in which goes medical insurance. And under a free market system, as Disney CEO Bob Iger said recently, “The consumer is king, not us the content provider and not you the distributor.”

This discussion is not solely societal, political, economic, or even medical. It is all of these and as well a philosophical one. We must be willing to ask ourselves some deeply rooted questions about our own individuality, such as where does the individual stand when against the collective.

The answer historically is in a line with a number.


This column is the beginning of a series on the issue of Health Care Reform. I find the topic interesting, yet more so it seems in need of serious and thoughtful discussion.