Healthcare Is In the Hands of Who?

According to a Sept 11 front page Wall Street Journal article, bank regulators are still struggling over the wording of the regulations for the "Volcker" rule.  And while we are still struggling with the too-big-to-fail banks, the gun control wars continue, with a portion of northern Colorado wanting to succeed and form the 51st state and Newtown gun permit applications going up. At the same time, two New York careerist politicians were undeterred by the humiliating spectacle of their foibles going public, and made frighteningly credible come-back bids for public office. Expert advisers and policymakers failed to protect a cautious and intellectual President from a serious foreign policy stumble that has implications for the rest of his important agenda, including immigration reform and the national budget. And this book charges that our nation's capital is a narcissistic bubble of interlocked and attention-hungry reporters, facilitators, politicians and lobbyists for whom power is the only prize.

While the Disease Management Care Blog is an equal opportunity skeptic, it's finding it increasingly difficult to believe that the current crew of regulators, state elected officials, politicians, advisers, politicians, reporters and lobbyists can really be trusted with the understanding, funding, interpreting, enforcement of the deadlines, regulations, payment rules and information technology that undergirds health care.  The point isn't that the banks screwed us, that politics are polarized, that "unknown unknowns" lurk everywhere, that voters can make bad decisions, that power politics are a necessary evil or who is right or who is wrong, the point is that  Health Care 2.0 is vulnerable and has a troubled prognosis with a dysfunctional government. Present company included.
 
Years ago, the Disease Management Care Blog watched one version of the movie Titanic. As the ship began to list and the doomed patiently waited on deck for their instructions, a DMCB spawn asked why the passengers couldn't just lash some desk chairs together, jump and survive with a jury-rigged raft.  The tut-tuting DMCB pointed out that the water was frigid, the raft would disintegrate and the fools would die.

Looking at what's going in, it's beginning to wonder if the well-meaning, honorable and smart health care folks who are on the deck of the the USS Healthcare need to reconsider whether they should continue to not be alarmed by the listing or.... whether it's time to think about a potentially worse raft option. We'll have a better idea of that in 2014.