Opportunity Lost

A guy named T.R. Reid has written a really good book on healthcare around the world. Specifically, he has written about how five of our kindred modern industrial democracies provide for health care for their citizens. He discusses the pros and cons and the variances in approach between them. He compares all of that to how we are doing it – or how we think we are doing it. He points out a lot of things that everybody has heard before; he points out much more that most of us haven't heard before. He has also made a really good documentary which has been aired on Public Television about all of this. And he has gone around the country promoting his book. That has often caused him to be interviewed in depth by Public Radio. I have heard him a couple of different times and have been impressed by how much he knows and how useful that which he knows could have been to our elected leaders as they went about trying to implement health care reform; or, in the case of the out of power party, as they went about trying not to implement health care reform. My net net reaction has been that Mr. Reid has learned a great deal of useful information, and that if he could learn it, perhaps all of us Americans could learn it. Perhaps even our elected leaders could have learned it. Perhaps all that learning could have produced a rational national (poetry intended) discussion about what can be done about our health care system. Perhaps we could have learned a great deal from discussing what many other successful and intelligent democracies in the world have been doing. Perhaps we all, citizens and leaders alike could have learned – jointly – a rational and effective way to improve a system which is clearly broken, from a cost viewpoint, from a results viewpoint and from a coverage viewpoint.

But we didn't, or at least we haven't had that discussion. Instead some of us all got together in public meetings and turned red in the face, shouted, followed the redness with purpleness and shouted some more. It strikes me as interesting that the people indulging in this simian sort of behavior are typically the same people who advocate teaching intelligent design. But that aside, we had some loud shouting and some sloganeering and some not so very well veiled racist assaults on our president and little else related to one of the most important issues facing us. And the republicans have just said no. I guess that's the best to be expected from America.

Too bad – it was an opportunity lost.