Now, don't you think the organizers knew that there were going to be 400 versus 300 people coming to those sessions, and arrange for the appropriate room? It's not like this stuff has changed much in the past few years. Might there be some kind of bias against the virus people from the malaria crowd? Hmmm.
Anyway, I left the conference early (early) Sunday morning and caught a cab to Union Station. (As far as I'm concerned, in the northeast corridor the only civilized way to travel is by train. Takes a little longer, but it beats being publicly strip-searched after waiting an hour in line before being thrown into a flying tin can where you have exactly one inch of wiggle room and the passenger in the seat ahead of you leans their seat back, making comfort a complete impossibility. Gimme the train any day over that!) While winding through the streets of Washington, we drove by the offices of The Cato Institute. Say what you will about their politics, but they have a lovely building.
After we passed it, I began thinking about Cato's little YouTube clip that I wrote about last week. Recall, the title was "You Are
Not The Customer," and it went on to argue in various ways that government intervention in the healthcare system would only make matters worse. That's of course in keeping with Cato's philosophy, which is that free-market solutions are virtually always the best solutions. One odd thing about the clip is that they complain about the wacky computer situation in the current healthcare system (they are right to complain; it really is that bad), but imply that that's because government legislated it...only their overall argument is to prevent the encroachment of government into healthcare by opposing the current legislation. In other words, the lousy system we've got is mostly because of a free-market model. Another point they never mention is that other countries—and by "other countries" I mean "virtually all other countries with standards of living comparable to ours"—manage to have perfectly functional health systems that are either run directly by the government (Great Britain) or have insurance systems mostly or entirely administered by the government (Western European countries, Canada). And these countries manage to spend, in all but two or three cases, less than half of what we spend on healthcare in the US. Remember this the next time we talk about the decline and fall of, say, American manufacturing and consider how much insurance premiums hurt the bottom line of so many corporations.
Cato's need to regard every political and social issue through the lens of free markets and the benefits they provide is actually neatly shown in the title of their piece: you are not the customer. Cruising by their offices at five in the morning, I was struck by the oddness of that title. For instance, they didn't say "the government will make you sicker," or "you're just another number to a bureaucrat," but they focus on your identity as a customer. But how is being a "customer" in healthcare related in any meaningful way to being a customer when you go food shopping, buy a cell phone, or look for a place to live? As a customer, you have a right to expect that the fridge you buy will function, at the very least, as long as the warranty applies...and if it doesn't last much beyond that warranty you'll probably heavily consider buying a different brand next time. (This is why the Rubin family will no longer be buying any products of the Magic Chef company, whose fridge lived a paltry 18 months, six months beyond its warranty.)
But how do you do that in health care? Do you march into the hospital and demand that the staff have Grandma—who in her prime smoked two packs a day and drank enough Bloody Marys to make Boris Yeltsin blush, and did this for forty years—doing the Lindy Hop in the next 24 hours, or else? Do you request a refund after you develop a wound infection after your gallbladder surgery (a known complication)? Do you pay your primary care physician only if the pills he or she gives you make you feel better?
Doctors are very much like plumbers, electricians, and car mechanics: they have a specialized knowledge base that makes it difficult at best for a layperson—a "customer"—to judge their body of work. Unless you have specialized training, you pretty much have to trust them in their diagnoses. Of course, as anyone who has taken an Old Yeller-type automobile to a car shop knows, a mechanic can give you options: "if I just fix the fan belt, your '93 Chevy Celebrity can probably make it another six months...if we add a carburetor and an alternator to that, maybe you'll get another year beyond that." You as a customer can make some informed decisions based on that information. But is that really the system one would want in medicine? "Well, pay for these drugs now, and your chance of a massive heart attack and a long rehab costing your family $30,000 in five years will be cut in half. Or you can just start saving up for The Big One. Which would you prefer?" There's a reason why discussions about money are at something of a remove in healthcare. You couldn't imagine some doctors taking financial advantage of situations with stressed-out families terrified of losing a loved one? Is that really how everyone would benefit? David Goldhill, the CEO who critiques the current system in the Cato piece, does I think helpfully point out how peculiar the system of financing has become in medicine, where the actual value of an MRI is...well, it's totally unclear. But imposing a "customer" model onto that system without even beginning to consider some of the implications of that decision is, to my thinking, scarily naive.
One last thought on this theme. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope that you are all off to reunions with family and friends. Many of you will be traveling, especially by car. Some good news: car travel (at least on highways) has gotten remarkably safer over the past few years. We are at the lowest level of highway fatalities in the past 40 years. Some of this has to do with the recession as there are fewer people on the road, but a lot has to do with various engineering changes made both inside the car and out. This week NPR did a series on car and highway safety (which can be found here and here) and the stories are worth the listen, requiring less than 20 minutes of your time.
Highlights: one of the reasons why cars now have audio/radio controls on the wheel is to prevent you from taking your attention away from the road to change stations, adjust volume etc. Now you can keep your eyes on the road and flip stations to your heart's delight. Not bad, right? Capitalism in action, yes? Even more enlightening (to me, anyway) was this: you are also safer on the road because of some simple-yet-enlightened changes to the physical structure of the highway: rumble strips now can be found on the sides of most interstates to jolt into vigilance that person with a wandering (or sleepy) mind who has drifted out of the lane; caps on the end of roadside rails (instead of the older kind that "dove" into the ground) prevent cars from running up onto them and vaulting into the air; and cable guardrails have been installed increasingly to prevent cars from crossing medians.
Who is responsible for these changes to the road that keep people safer? Civil engineers! But how could such a thing be possible? After all, they don't work for profit, now do they? They're just merely government employees. And as well all know, because we've heard it for thirty solid years since Reagan became President, "government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem." What say you, Ron?
—br
Five days in DC, and no call? Ted Theodore F. is sad.
ReplyDelete