A call to action?

Alot of what I have been reading lately has gotten me a bit annoyed at the medical profession as a whole. Everyone from the media to the bloggers to the AMA to the PRESIDENT has been whining about the state of medicine today...perhaps we should try doing something about it.

There is a lot of negativity in the medical community over the current state of affairs. The field is being torn apart between the interests of the patients, the government, the insurance companies, the bureaucrats, the media, the physicians, the administrators and the pharmaceutical companies. Even within the individual components there are an infinite number of directions being pulled. It seems like every part of the medical world is pulling in a different direction in an attempt to topple one of the few human enterprises that has helped the world progress out of the dark ages in upon itself.

It's like one of those stupid vector problems from high school physics: the ultimate sum of the directions that everyone is pulling is 0...there is no direction, there is no movement. We have reached an absolute balance point where something needs to be done, but nobody knows which direction to push the damned thing because we're too busy trying to reconcile the millions of individual components that have created the mess in the first place.

And so we sit around in complacency, scratching our heads and bemoaning the fact that something needs to be done. We throw around half-baked ideas of government run medicine or completely free market medicine or Doc-in-a-box medicine and hope that someone has enough momentum to tip the damned thing in the right direction. Meanwhile, the problem just sits there getting more entangled as it is pulled in more directions.

We call it a health care crisis, but no one seems to be doing anything about it. A crisis implies a need for action...and to my 24 years of memory medicine has been in a state of crisis since the first Clinton administration (I was in 3rd grade by the way). We need a leader to take on this mess, cut it down to the basic issues (of how to provide health care for those in need/transfer money from recipient to providers/cut out the rest of the BS) and plow the solution through the steaming piles of divisive political BS that have hampered the progress of this country.

We predict a disastrous future without action to prepare for it...we need to prepare! Maybe it's time that we (as decent, rational, free thinking, American human beings) do something...