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The New President and the Future of Health Care
- Dr Tim
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< Well, the election is over and history has now been made! As the new president begins his adminisration, it is now time to fulfill promises and advance the new health agenda. In tough economic times it will be challenging to meet the demands of balancing economic challenges wits longstanding national health priorities
There certainly is no reason to repeat the over-processed laundry list of items that need to be addressed at the political, policy, and payment level nationally regarding the provision of healthcare services. Many of the provisions of the policy and platform proposals coming from Obama don’t yet fully address the challenges affecting the future of healthcare from the perspective of the future. The new leadership now needs to entirely re-conceptualize responses to the demands and needs for health care from the perspective of the emergent realities radically affecting the future of healthcare delivery. New technology, further understanding of the challenges embedded in complex adaptive systems, reconfiguration of primary care services and network, information-driven and evidence-based practice facilities and processes, and a host of related components now re-describe the character and content of the future provision of healthcare services. While there is certainly a strong nod to these realities in the political forums, there is precious little public depth of dialogue and discussion that would give anyone a glimpse of the veracity of understanding from the candidates of the implications of these changes.
Perhaps discussion of any depth is avoided because of the potential to overwhelm what is often perceived as the single-mindedness of the American populace. Clearly, one of the challenges of American politics is the rather simplistic and absolutist sound bites and brevities that come from politicians and policymakers that not only fit into this simplemindedness, but also serve to advance it. Any thinking person knows that the issues and answer to the questions and challenges that affect health care, among other major issues, are not unilateral nor are they simplistic, and they are certainly not absolute. However, the politician would suggest that it is impossible to get elected or to get public support without taking such positions and applying singular tactics. However, the truth is, if every politician stopped doing it, its usefulness would erode. I submit that there is a strong factual basis for the limited level of understanding of the complexity of comprehensive problem-solving on the part of politicians. Politicians frequently engage in transference of their own inadequacies to the simplemindedness of the American public. Regardless of whether this is true or not, current capacity to respond to these critical issues are inadequate to the effort to create a truly effective and sustainable healthcare system within the context of this emerging “quantum” age.
It isn’t likely that we will see much change over the short term in the depth and breadth of dialogue related to an adequate future-oriented response to healthcare transformation. Still, I hold out hope that our new president will call together the best healthcare minds in the country to the formation of an action commission directed and committed to rewriting the healthcare script, reformatting the structure of healthcare, and reconfiguring healthcare delivery within the context of a more future-oriented conceptualization. Getting the context right is the first step to making sure that the responsive design and strategy best reflect emerging reality and more effectively create a viable and sustainable model for the structuring, payment, and provision of healthcare for the forseeable future. Doing so is no longer optional.
