Preemptive Strike

A brief preface to some of the constructive criticism that might eventually stem from my experiences working in a giant public hospital:

Running a good hospital system is an incredibly difficult proposition. This is due in part to the fact that providing excellent health care requires a lot of different things being done well in unison. This is, as we all know, one of the hard parts of making any big system run efficiently.

Moreover, this intrinsic problem has been increasingly complicated by the development and entrenchment of our current privatized health care situation in the United States. Most health care not provided by the US government is provided by "health maintainance organizations" (HMOs), who incentive the use of exorbitantly expensive diagnostic tools and treatments for a small subset of the population (mostly the wealthy), while disincentivizing the provision of basic primary care for the everyone else.

And while many patients entering city's public hospitals ARE NOT covered by HMOs and rely primarily on insurance plans managed and paid for by the government (Medicare and Medicaid being the main programs), the incentive structure has been sufficiently warped by the influence of the private sector so as to create a similarly wacky organization of publicly financed care. This is sort of a complicated point - one which it behooves me to flesh out for you guys more thoroughly in the future.

With all of that said, there is a small but growing group of physicians (and MPHs, PhDs and JDs - and all of those degrees in combination) who are committed to figuring out how to make these public and private health systems work properly, providing excellent care at a reasonable cost. I'm meeting some of these inspirational characters in person in the hospital and reading about many more as part of my background reading for this job. In fact, I'll post up some interesting exerpts from an interview with one of the figureheads of this movement, Lucien Leape, in the near future.

Alright, that's all for now. Keep your eyes tuned to this space for more riveting (ha!) insights into (public) health care. Hopefully we'll all learn something along the way. Peace out.