Revitalizing Governance, Restoring Prosperity, and Restructuring Foreign Affairs by Fry Earl H.;

Author:Fry, Earl H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1752863
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

In his marvelous book the Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough chronicles how Paris made profound changes in the lives of eminent Americans who lived there for a time during the nineteenth century.156 Medical doctors and surgeons in Paris were far more advanced than their counterparts in the United States. Indeed, for a good part of the nineteenth century, Americans on the plains and in rural areas often sought surgery at the barbershop under the most primitive of conditions. What American physicians brought back from Paris would later revolutionize medical treatment in the United States.

The leap from the barbershop to modern surgery is now being replicated in the form of new technological innovations and apps.157 This technological revolution will push health care into an entirely different realm and will do so at significantly lower costs. For example, information technology is making it possible to compile patients’ entire medical history and make it available to pertinent medical personnel in real time.158 Best practices and new discoveries in the medical field may now be disseminated around the country and world on an almost instantaneous basis, and technology now permits remote treatment of patients located hundreds or even thousands of miles away from medical specialists.159 IBM’s famous Watson supercomputer is currently being used in the medical field, 3-D printing is bringing about major changes in product development, apps are more pertinent and user friendly than ever before, genome sequencing is becoming more relevant for patient treatment, and robots are being used safely in a variety of surgical procedures.160 Greater emphasis on healthy lifestyles and disease prevention will complement these technological innovations.161

The Institute of Medicine estimates 30 percent of all health-care spending in the United States is pure waste.162 The conundrum has been that this waste for consumers and taxpayers is often pure profit for health-care providers and insurers. The set of policy recommendations made above will drastically eliminate waste and begin to bring down overall expenditures to levels found in other developed nations. This process will also bring major reductions in future liabilities of federal and state governments in the Medicare, Medicaid, and other related entitlement programs.

A few words should be devoted to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as “Obamacare” in some circles. The first president to call for universal health-care coverage was Roosevelt—not Franklin but Teddy. Over a century later, President Obama finally moved the nation in the direction of expanding health-care insurance coverage to many more American citizens. He should be applauded for this move, even though his administration and Congress were swayed far too often by the arguments of special interest groups and the final law did little to control spiraling health-care costs.163 In comparison to neighboring Canada, which covers all of its legal residents at about half of the cost per capita of the proposed ACA, the Obama plan does not produce a single-payer system, universal coverage, national health insurance, equal access to services, nor cost containment.164 Nevertheless, most Americans continue to be satisfied with their company-provided health insurance, but this reliance on specific companies is fraught with problems.

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