Obamacare’s Implementation Threatens A Golden Age For The Healing Arts
Photo Credit: WikipediaMedical practice and healthcare policy are on a collision course. From an intellectual perspective, we are entering a golden age of the healing arts. The full promise of genomic medicine informing diagnosis and treatment beckons from just over the horizon. Younger physicians, just entering practice, have the ability to alleviate human suffering that no generation of doctors has ever previously known.
But not so fast.
The administration of health care policy, and ultimately dollars, are also undergoing a generational shift. But this shift is founded on some of the most irrational politics this country has ever seen. Future generations observing the political changes of the past five years will invariably say, “what were they thinking?”
The Affordable Care Act was not the product of any informed or learned group, it was a hastily contrived political farce that was literally cobbled together at the last possible minute. It was never intended to become law — except that it did. For the past 3 1/2 years literally “all the kings horses, and all of the kings men” have pushed and prodded to give it the appearance of workability. We are on the threshold of finding out if they were successful.
In medicine, we sometimes talk about the compression of morbidities, how the ravages of time and multiple maladies may overwhelm the patient at the end of life. That compression sequence also seems to describe afflictions of the Affordable Care Act as it careens towards implementation.
Read more from this story HERE.
