The Health Care Blog: Here We Go Again - Again

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By RICK PETERS

Last Friday morning, delirious, wasted, bone tired, driving home from the Emergency Room at 8AM in my beat-up little truck with only one speaker working. Amid all of us awash in the blogosphere thank the stars for NPR and professional journalism. Steve Inskeep, from Morning Edition was interviewing Angela Braly, CEO of Wellpoint. Perfect! Wellpoint is the largest health insurer in the U.S. in terms of covered lives. Also, Wellpoint, the former non-profit Blue Cross of California converted into a very profitable for-profit corporation, represents the epitome of for-profit medicine.

Mind you I’ve already thrown in the towel. Any meaningful reform seems well past doomed. Harold and Louise are already back channeled through Newt and Sarah, and fringe lunatics are getting airtime, calling Obama a Nazi because they cannot understand the difference between National Socialism and Medicare. It would be comedy writ large if not for the gullibility of the American electorate. Oh well, here we go again.

The trouble is that our problems are so deep and fundamental that any sort of government driven health reform is destined to have limited impact despite the best intentions. That’s what was so painful and profound about Inskeep’s interview with Braly.1 If we are going to even start to move this mountain we are going to have to foster change from within the system. That change is going to have to come from all of us as a society and as patients, families, health care providers, health care organizations, and influential health care managers and executives.
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