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A Lighter Look: On the Corner of Business Blvd. and Health Ave.
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On the Corner of Business Blvd. and Health Ave.
By New Media Senior Producer Joel Schwartzberg
First it was car salesmen. Then lawyers. Now health care executives have moved into the top spot among the least trusted and most reviled scoundrels of Joe America. The next action movie, having used up vast resources of Nazis and Middle-Eastern villains over the years, might feature bad guys armed not with guns and rocket-launchers, but with obscene co-payments, generic drugs, and mandatory referrals.
As Dirty Harry might say, "Go ahead, make my deductible."
How did we get here? Well, it's what happens when two institutions that kept a safe distance for years suddenly intersect. We're at the corner of Business Boulevard and Health Avenue, and I wouldn't recommend crossing the street without a military escort. Business Boulevard is basically an autobahn, and Health Avenue is kind of like "March of the Penguins." And nobody likes when Penguins get run over.
Managed care proponents say the business of public health is just another institution that needs its financial house straightened out. It's like when your Dad says, "Who's gonna pay for all this?" In this case, he follows that up with, "Press one for a useless advice, two for an allowance extension, three to choose a new Dad, and four for Mom," and then promptly hangs up on you.
Managed care critics say that good health treatment and service is an inalienable right, even for aliens, and that everyone should be entitled to it. They point to other countries like Canada and the Netherlands and say, "these guys should be eating our healthcare dust and instead they're cleaning our clocks!" Those managed care critics really like their metaphors.
Almost everyone says the U.S. healthcare system is "broken." The rest say it's "on life support" just to be clever. But healthcare subscribers and small business owners are not the only ones suffering. Consider your pharmacist. In the old days, the local pharmacist was a healer who dispensed free advice and lollipops with your prescriptions. Nowadays he must be a bureaucracy-busting, investigative accountant and insurance fraud cop. It's the kind of stressful job people leave to work as air traffic controllers. And is it really a good idea to isolate stressed-out people in confined areas surrounded by shelves and shelves of powerful pharmaceuticals?
So we come back to the question: Are health and business irreconcilable bedfellows? Even Bert and Ernie have different beds, and Ernie's not beating Bert over the head with reams of claim forms and provider directories. But it's inevitable that our health becomes subject to economic considerations. It is, after all, the American Way, to "let the market decide" nearly everything in our lives.
My suggestion to break the impasse: more health care bad guys in the movies and in popular culture. Look what it did for lawyers - no kid wants to grow up to be a lawyer anymore. If no one grows up wanting to be a healthcare company executive, maybe their influence will fade, and we can go back to getting our biased medical advice strictly from uneducated neighbors, TV dramas, and infomercials.
Send comments to Joel Schwartzberg
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