Small moves, Ellie.

In the movie Contact with Jodie Foster, she learns from her father that her chances of collecting QSL’s were better if she made small moves, moving the dial only fractions of a megaherz rather than spinning it, to make contact with other hams.

She later applies that theory to her SETI work, and makes contact- but that’s another story.

My point here, is that if we really want to reform something, be it insurance, or healthcare, or government, the best moves, most of the time, are small moves. As in troubleshooting a car, the ‘Shotgun approach” where you replace a lot of components at once is costly and inefficient. You might spend $1500 and then never find out that the problem was actually a $10 filter.

So it is with the healthcare system. We have a great system, as is evidenced by the fact that people keep coming here to get healthcare they can’t get in other countries. So the idea of giving it a complete overhaul when there is so much right with it is ludicrous.

There are no end of people who are bitching about how horrible it all is, and their only solution seems to “let the government take it all over- THAT will fix it!!”

I’m staggered by this kind of lunacy, I really am. Like the pure socialist that nailed me down last week for a four plus hour earbending about her paramnesia, the kind of idiocy that whines about the US healthcare system is incomprehensible to me, and anyone with two functional brain cells.

So here’s a course of action that I think makes some ACTUAL sense. The healthcare system has some really good things going for it here, and a few really bad things. Insurance as well has some major issues. And that has always been the source of one of my biggest complaints.

See, Doctors stick together, no matter how fucked up they are. There are a few good ones, a few bad ones, and a BUNCH of “ok” ones. But if one fucks up, they cover for one another, for the most part, and they do so so when they fuck up themselves, their “buds” will come to their aid. The only way to get any satisfaction from a dr is if he fucks up SO Bad that it goes to a lawsuit, and then, the LAWYERS get involved. Then all common sense goes out the window. As a corollary to this, people have become so litigious that they think they can get a big paycheck from every allergic reation they have to every damned medecine.

There is nothing in between. A dr fucks up a little, gets off scot free. A dr fucks up a lot, he gets sued back to the cambrian era.

How about this?Instead of putting the wolves (Drs and lawyers) in charge of the sheep (us), we get that “in between” thing going on? Possibly a civillian review board of volunteers who examine cases of reported malfeasance on the part of the medical community- and here’s the tricky bit: Doesn’t fuck up everyon’es life when someone screws up. it happens all the time, and if it gets caught and the community gets the reprimand IT DESERVES when it deserves it, instead of “nothing or giant lawsuit” then there just might be a little improvement of the quality of medical care. Let’s try THAT for a year or ten, and if it helps, let’s take a look at the abuses to the system done by insurance companies.

By the way: Give this a little thought. At present health insuurance rates, it costs about $13000 to insure a family of four, and that’s pretty good insurance, like BCBS. if there are 40 million Americans without health insurance, BUYING them health insurance would cost about 13130 billion bucks.Divide that by the US population (300 million)and that’s less than $45$450 for each taxpayer.

yep. For $450 from each of us, per year, we could insure all those people without insurance, and they’d have good insurance. A long shot from the 1.7 trillion the Won wants to spend.

Why doesn’t anyone ever look at that?