To
be fair though, this isn’t about UNC Hospitals. It’s how we’ve set up
the game of health care in our country. The heart surgeon’s raise just
highlights the major problems we face with the price of care.
Start with the way we train specialty physicians such as cardiac surgeons.
First we make it make it much more lucrative to go into speciality [sic] care than we do primary care. So people want to become specialists.
Then
– unlike in most other countries – we expect our would-be doctors to go
into debt, often hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth, just to get a
medical education.
Finally we set up a reimbursement system that
pays so much for speciality care and so much less for primary care and
everyday care that large hospitals feel they must be able to deliver
these speciality services in order to compete and stay in business.
After reading that passage, I asked myself, “Who’s this ‘we’ Adam is talking about?” I certainly haven’t had anything to do with setting up the health system. Since Adam works for a left-of-center public policy group, I don’t think he is part of this “we,” either.
In fact, there is no “we” responsible for all of the various aspects of the health care system that Adam delineates.
The only “we” to which he possibly could be referring is the collective “we” of society. In practical terms, this means the government. And if “we” have allowed all of these arguably negative elements of the health-care system to develop, it must be up to “us” ? actually the government ? to do something about it.
If you think the government should exercise even more control over our health care ? and that’s the basic point of ObamaCare, isn’t it? ? then say so. But “we” fans of limited government, personal responsibility, and free markets take a different view.
