Your MUST READ on Healthcare

David Goldhill has done all of us a tremendous service with his 10,000 word article in The Atlantic Online. Yes, it’s long, but it’s thoughtful and true and something that really must be read. I had linked to it as an update, here, but decided that it really needs to be promoted, disseminated and discussed, and not relegated to an “update” that might be missed.

Goldhill is a Democrat who looks at the healthcare not as a wonk or a partisan, but from the perspective of a businessman who has just lost his father due to hospital-borne infection. He writes of his experience as an American without healthcare, and with. He writes as a son who watched his father die while the hospital served the customer – which was Medicare – rather than the patient. He writes about inefficiency, having twice prevented his father from being taken to surgeries not meant for him.

He is very clear about what is not working within our current health care system. He is equally as clear in noting that nothing the government is currently proposing as “reform” will actually fix what is not working.

Goldhill’s grief, and his love for his father and mother, permeates the whole piece, but this thoughtful analysis is not mawkish, and it is not meant to push your emo buttons; it is meant, in fact, to turn off the white-hot emotionalism that surrounds this issue so that realities may be exposed and hashed-out.

This is the most honest thing I have yet read about the issue of healthcare in America, and what genuine reforms must be considered – thoughtfully, deliberately, meaningfully and carefully – and not simply thrown together and rammed through our legislative bodies by leaders who are either unconscionably dishonest or honestly huckstering “free, free, free!” at people they do not respect.

Read this; pass it around. Urge everyone else you know, on the left and on the right, to read it. If you can’t do 10,000 words just now, start with this summary and it will only whet your appetite for the rest.

H/T Margaret Cabaniss over at Inside Catholic

Related:
A case for “social entrepreneurship replacing bureaucratic elitism as the means of solving human problems.” Another good read.