our next task

I sent this out today to many other psychologists, as part of a discussion about whether to push for a national health insurance plan:


At this time in our history, with "change" taking over our government, and the banks, mortgage companies, auto industry and who can guess what else being nationalized, the question about health care in America is a bigger question than just about National Health Insurance. Hopefully all of our thoughts about this issue are more complex than how much we will get paid for 90806.

IMHO, the best thing that could happen (I am not holding my breath here) is to have a bunch of doctors, therapists, patients, hospital people, non-patients, economists,and bureaucrats locked into a room somewhere. It would be their job to construct a health care system from the bottom up, to design a system that would do the best job of keeping America healthy at the most reasonable cost.

How much of our GNP should we spend keeping us healthy and alive? In this time of socializing everything I do not think we can let the desire for profit be the deciding factor in health care decisions. Every other developed country has found a way to pay for care without having sick people run the risk of going bankrupt.

Who will do triage and on what basis? Should Medicare spend $12K for a demented 97 year-old man to have his teeth removed and dentures built? How much do we spend to keep an infant alive who has a badly damaged cortex?

How much should mind/body interactions be part of the deciding factors? What would be the best education for a mental heath professional in the next twenty years? Is there any chance that someone can be educated to perform that function?

How would we pay for the development of the best new drugs, not just the most profitable ones? How many drugs are good for us anyway? How much should it cost people who don't live a healthy life-style, or is it part of our freedom to smoke and eat Whoppers, and then have the government pay for bariatric surgery?

The country is a mess. The world is a mess. That gives us an opportunity to tear things apart and build a new system Think outside the band-aid. Think outside the fifty-minute hour. Let's have a real discussion.

I think I will send this on to my friend, Barak. He asked for my in-put.