Labor Day Weekend Notes

It's Saturday in Prescott, and we are sitting here, inside, with rain pouring down. With coffee. It's a good day. I hope that your weekend is as good as mine has been so far.

August has come and gone without a health care reform bill. Mostly, that's a good thing. The bills that have been floating through Congress have been monstrosities, keeping all the bad parts of our current system while adding more bad things on top. The demagoguery on both ends of the political spectrum continues to be nauseating, but then that has not changed for at least my lifetime.

My academy, the American Academy of Family Physicians, supports reform that would insure everyone, but I think most of us remain skeptical about the federal bureaucracy doing a better job than private industry has done. An editorial by Hugh Hewitt points out that everyone is being asked to sacrifice for a better health system, except for one group: Trial lawyers. One of the huge drivers of health care cost is the tort system, and if Congress and the President were serious about decreasing costs and using that money to cover everyone else, they would address the problem of the costs of liability suits in our country.

I suspect we'll see that problem addressed by our legislators right after a flock of pigs fly over the White House. In formation. Going south for the winter.

In the past few weeks, the incoming head of the Canadian Medical Association has written in the press that their system is woefully inadequate, and cannot continue on its current course. You can read the article about her statements at:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jbjzPEY0Y3bvRD335rGu_Z3KXoQw

She appears in the article to be calling for a private plan alongside the public health system, which I find very interesting. For many years, it has been illegal in Canada for physicians and patients to go outside their public system, so patients have only the American system to get around the waiting times and inefficiencies of their system.

I can't really defend our current system, but when you read in the press about all the bad problems, remember that you need to know the context of the statistics that are used on both sides. Many of them follow the old saw that there are liars, danged liars, and statisticians....

Have a lovely weekend and a marvelous September.