The Vision: Life in a Reformed Health Care System

The Vision Chapter: Life in a Reformed Health Care System

The biggest problem with health policy folks is that they almost never tell us about their vision for health care. They can chatter endlessly about minor policy matters, but fall completely silent when it comes to the big picture.

This is in stark contrast to such past writers as Samuel Butler and B.F. Skinner on the left and Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein on the right - all of whom were only too happy to tell us about their visions.

By a health care vision I mean at a minimum:

• In an ideal health care system, what are doctors and patients doing that is different from and better than what they are doing today?
• What keeps them doing it? That is, how are they rewarded for doing whatever they are doing and discouraged from doing something else?

A possible hurdle is that many people in health care are still socialists. These are people who think that a plan devised by a few at the top will be carried out by the many at the bottom, even though it's not in their self-interest to do so. This is not a vision. It is a hallucination. Thinking you can give an order and everyone will carry it out in lock-step is not creative thought. It is an abdication of thought.

Our Handbook on State Health Care Reform is chock full of ideas for health care reform at the state level. The last chapter gives the vision: how doctors and patients will live under our reforms.

Conclusion: Life in a Reformed Health Care System

http://www.ncpa.org/email/State_HC_Reform_Book_conclusion.pdf