How should Obama reform health care?

Moral of the Story: Many options to choose from. The unique complexity of America offers many options, some better than others. You should really read the article to fully understand the implications of our situation.


http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_gawande?printable=true

Annals of Public Policy
Getting There from Here: How should Obama reform health care?
by Atul Gawande


Our jerry-rigged health-care system contains many models that reformers can build on.

(exerpt)
In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty. The Canadians had stories like the 1946 Toronto Globe and Mail report of a woman in labor who was refused help by three successive physicians, apparently because of her inability to pay. In Australia, a 1954 letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald sought help for a young woman who had lung disease. She couldn’t afford to refill her oxygen tank, and had been forced to ration her intake “to a point where she is on the borderline of death.” In Britain, George Bernard Shaw was at a London hospital visiting an eminent physician when an assistant came in to report that a sick man had arrived requesting treatment. “Is he worth it?” the physician asked. It was the normality of the question that shocked Shaw and prompted his scathing and influential 1906 play, “The Doctor’s Dilemma.” The British health system, he charged, was “a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity and human suffering.”