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HOME > ABOUT > PRESS > HEALTH CARE AND THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE
Article published - November 12, 2007
Credit: North Bay Business Journal
Health care and the public conscience
COMMENTARY
BY BRAD BOLLINGER
BUSINESS JOURNAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
AS PROVIDERS PERFORM DAILY MIRACLES, LONG TERM WILL REQUIRE A NEW VISION
With premiums and co-payments rising, 1,200-employee Medtronic CardioVascular in Santa Rosa responded in 2006 with its Total Health concept aimed at improving overall employee wellness.
Sutter Health is offering an intensive personal coaching program for employers that is showing impressive results in preventative care and in encouraging critical lifestyle changes.
Redwood Regional Medical Group has helped create a nationwide network of leading community oncology practices to advance treatments for patients and increase clout with insurers and pharmaceutical companies.
The Redwood Community Health Coalition serves the under- and uninsured across the North Bay and beyond in 17 community health centers.
Largely unseen by the broader community many of the centers are in out-of-the-way business parks often to save rent they serve 150,000 patients with basic care, or about one of six people across the region, regardless of their ability to pay. Nearly 40 percent of the patients coming to the centers are children. More than half are Latino. Many adults work two jobs. Nearly half earn only about $20,000 a year.
The network of clinics is, as one health care leader put it, a separate system within a system. Without it, the whole system could very well collapse.
In Sonoma County, a broad public-private Health Action Council has been formed to wrestle with the region's daunting challenges from hospital closures to mental health treatment.
In Sacramento, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Legislative leaders are trying to reach agreement on reforms that would extend some form of coverage to the state's approximately 6.6 million uninsured.
The proposals are enormously complex, with broad impacts involving hundreds of millions of dollars across the health care and insurance sectors.
These efforts, locally and statewide, presented last week at the BUSINESS JOURNAL'S annual health care conference, are on the leading edge of innovation. They are critical pieces of the health care puzzle, and they are improving lives. Miracles happen daily through the efforts of very dedicated people.
But ultimately, they may all fail if there is not a fundamental shift in how we all think about health care.
One of the most disturbing trends health care leaders point to is that, for the first time, the lifespan of the current generation of youth may actually be shorter than its parents'.
Childhood obesity and diabetes which put an individual at risk for other diseases are reaching an epidemic.
It is a largely hidden national crisis, they say.
Jack Glaser, senior vice president for theology and ethics and director of the Center for Health Care Reform for St. Joseph Health System, compared the magnitude of change needed in health care to the end of racial segregation and child labor.
He sees health care reform on two horizons: the distant and the immediate.
The distant horizon is what he calls "public conscience work" to end "inherited chronic social injustice" in health care for which there is "no single villain." So no finger-pointing.
"Societies can crawl out of chronic social injustice the U.S. has done it," Dr. Glaser said.
The public conscience work "is the process of society moving from confused, conflicted and vacillating conscience mind, affections, imagination, energy of will to clear, convinced, purposeful conscience on a given issue," Dr. Glaser said.
Sacramento or Washington, D.C. can't do this on their own. It will take an engaged public, he said, and a "deepening realization about harm and misery to individuals and society."
And pick your misery: physical or financial. There is plenty of both.
Change will take a "growing clarity about a vision of a new and different order" and "swelling energy and will for making this new order a social reality," Dr. Glaser said.
Dr. Glaser did not express favoritism for any one system, say European, over another. But he believes it is worth studying all of them for best practices.
While this probing and public conscience work is under way, the issues on the immediate horizon need to be addressed, such as coverage for all children, prevention and many other measures in health care and in the state and federal capitols.
These efforts, he said, constitute "reform as urgent social rescue." They run parallel to the broader need for fundamental change that, as one panelist said, moves from the current emphasis in the system of treating the sick to one of health.
Right now, we are in the urgent stage. But unless we want to stay here forever, we'll need to get to next stage, and the sooner the better. |
