Explaining USA Health Care Debate: Repairing Humans and Our Systems

USA Health Care debate is clearly about the allocation and distribution of cost. I keep hearing it expressed as a poor health care. Most instances where USA death tolls are higher could be attributable to relative affluence (affordable illegal drugs, affordable guns, affordable sugar).

Take Cancer. USA's system developed the best responses in the world, and help explain not just the increased rates of survivorship in the USA, but actually floats a lot of other boats as well.

The hypothesis being debated by politicians is not that cancer rates would be lower in a single-payer system, or that treatment of injury would improve, but that costs would be distributed differently. Right now you get very affordable health care if you have Medicare (are over 65) or are eligible for Veterans Administration hospitals, or perhaps are poor enough for Medicaid (I know less about that). But under those systems, you are better off if you have an extremely expensive ailment (like cancer) but not clearly better off (red tape) than if you go to the emergency room of a private hospital.

This blog was developed after a conversation with one of my kids who attended United World College in Bosnia y Herzogovina. All 3 of my kids have lived as ex-pats and wind up trying to explain a system that most people don't even understand in their own countries. If a nation can't even manage its own appliance repairs, how can it manage human bodies?

The answer is as complex as the question is simple. In the USA, people who are the smartest in their class go to Med School or get employed by pharmaceutical research firms. Those people are not available to fix laptops, the money is in fixing hearts and livers. In Ghana, only a slight fraction of smart people have the opportunity to go to med school. I means there are more smart people available to repair laptops.

Now Blow Your Mind on Q-Analysis

Clean, Big and Obvious:   Six Billion People Aren't Going Away

"Uncle Will" Stephenson

I left the last blog hanging on a follow up (which is coming).  But it's a holiday and vacation coming up, when I traditionally "go academic" in the blog.

Dirty Little Secret : Clean Big Obvious

The weak link is between "Secret" and "Obvious".  The first question you have to ask is "Obvious to Whom?" "Secret to Whom?"   Or does a secret only matter to one billion "big and clean" people?

Whom is being Surveyed?   This is a question I grew up with, as the oldest kid whose dad was getting a Ph.D. in Journalism at Columbia Missouri - then considered the top J-School and still a giant.   I sat as a kid and absorbed dinner conversation between my dad, his Faculty Advisor Will Stephenson, and my great Grandfather, William Freeland.  And I was told to finish my peas, and not spread them about the plate, because children were starving in China...