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 The Root Causes of
Healthcare Dysfunction
When we
hear healthcare reform discussed, it is usually centered
around the subject of some sort of economic plan to pay for those who
can't afford treatment. You may have noticed that
I haven't addressed that
issue.
This series of web sites deals with the root
causes of social dysfunction. A root cause, as I use
the term, is a misperception or blind spot that underlies the more
visible causes that most people, often erroneously, see as the primary
problem. Correcting a root cause costs nothing, and in fact saves
enormous amounts of money.
We have established that our healthcare system
is the third leading cause of death. Based on that,
one could make the argument that the harm the system does cancels out
at least a large part of its benefits. When you consider that
Americans spend about $1.3 trillion dollars annually (1) on healthcare,
we can easily draw the conclusion that we're not getting our money's
worth. |
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Some of this runs very
much counter to conventional wisdom, but if conventional
wisdom were correct, we would have already solved the problem. One
reason I don't take a position on who should pay the bills is that that
is an ideological question that I feel should be left for the people to
decide. We also have scores of economists working on the problem,
but they are at an |
impasse because of the astronomical costs
involved.
When I entered medical school, I had
the wish that I would learn magical healing powers.
It was very disappointing when I discovered that I could only cure a
very small percentage of the sick people that I encountered. I
find that people in general want to believe that doctors have powerful
treatments. That's why they
bestow doctors with a title. But in order to cope in the
real world, we need to be realistic. I know a lot of sick wealthy
people that can attest to the fact that money can't buy health, and sick
poor people that believe that if only they had enough money, they would
be cured.
Of course this is all relative, but it is this
social delusion that is the basis of the heavy emphasis on
the high priority our society places on trying to come up with paying
for existing costs, rather than addressing the reality of our low cure
rates, high incidence of medically induced injuries and deaths, and
exorbitant costs.1.
Levit, K.,
Smith, C., Cowan, C., Lazenby, H., & Martin, A. (2002,
January/February). Inflation spurs health spending in 2000. Health
Affairs, 21(1), 172-181.
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