This last week I was very involved in health care issues and solutions. Not personal issues, but issues of how we can best provide good and sufficient health care to the people who are in need, regardless, as they say, of ability to pay. I’ve been involved with health care for much of the last 50 years or so, sometimes as an educator, at others as a provider, and still others as a planner. My work has put me in close contact with the health care delivery system as it exists, and a participant in the work of advancing the goals of high quality care for all. I identify that as care that is good and sufficient. I reject, as a matter of both personal preference and practicality, care that exceeds the needs of the patient and the possibility of good, responsible medicine. It isn’t easy.
It isn’t easy today, especially, when our health – yours and mine – is no longer a reflection of civilized society raised to a very sophisticated level. No, health has now become a picture of unmitigated horror, as we try to cope with rocket-propelled costs, overwhelming opposition, but beyond all that, with politicians who see your health care and mine as something they own that they can play with for their own purposes and benefit.
Politicians today need to stop and ask themselves: "Which side am I on?" Every move, every plan put forward, seems calculated only to achieve an office or hold onto one already owned. One group is only interested in displacing the other, or preventing the other from dong so. Everything they do is at great cost to us, but not to our benefit.
I’ve gotten in the habit, when ending a conversation, of adding: "Take care." I think I need to modify that: "Take care of yourself. Nobody else will."
Of course, that’s always been the answer.
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