Healthcare For All

     It must be recognized that the continuing growth in health-care spending is inevitable in not only this country but throughout the world.  The stark reality regarding health-care spending is that death is generally considered the lowest-cost option.Technological developments in medicine are to blame for the increases in spending as improvements lower the annual death rate but also necessitate costly follow ups, medication, and generally some form of  intervention years later. These advancements, coupled with the inevitability of increased health-care spending are the major creators of new medical markets, and will continue to play an important role on the United States' economy in the years ahead.

     Increases in health-care spending need money to fund, and the question therein lies how do we fund them? The implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010 will produce major changes in medical insurance and govenment spending on health-care in 2014. Taxes drive government funding, so what kind of taxes are we talking about? As of 2009, healthcare-spending in the United States accounted for about 17% of GDP wherein approximately half, or roughly 8% was funded by government. Under the Affordable Care Act, we can only expect government spending on health-care to increase, and it is suggested that two-thirds of the increased taxes would fall upon the top percentage of American earners. Increased spending by the government on health-care and the coupled growth in medicine and medical technology would mostly be plowed back into the private economy that produced those advancements. Compare this type of spending to the amount spent on wars abroad, the return is tremendous. As discussed, the growth and development of medical and high-tech markets continues to be one of the larger drivers of the United States' economy, and will continue to create jobs for undergraduate college students such as myself in the near future though this dynamic is often clouded over by political punditry.

     An effective, broad-based healthcare system is fundamental in promoting and sustaining the well being of a nation's individuals. A government supported healthcare system must come with limits, as much of America's high level of spending is in pursuit of new technologies, often driven by the pursuit of higher reimbursements. Increases in obesity and the development of chronic diseases can severely impact health, but also account for nearly $3 out of every $4 dollars spent on healthcare. A suggestible solution to part of this high level of spending can come from a focus on promoting the effects of obesity on health, or by establishing care-management networks to reduce the clutter of what has become a mess in managing patients with multiple chronic illnesses. One issue that adds to the clutter involved with patients with multiple chronic illnesses is that there is no common paperwork involved which has pushed the patients themselves to become their own care providers. We as American's often find it difficult to deal with restrictions on our choices, the recently failed ban on soda above a certain size in New York City for example, but in an effort to produce an effective, broad-based health care system majority funded by the taxpayers can only be established with reasonable restraints on inappropriate healthcare procedures and unproven care.

    What do we seek to achieve by taking a visit to the doctor? One in which the doctor is unestablished in his practices, or one in which he has a solution to the issue presented? Never before has the possibility of reforming modern medical practices in America been so pronounced, and without proper attention to improvement, the state of medicine will continue to move toward a political and administrative debacle. Implementing new standards and protocols to improve the quality of care and move the current system away from a medical malpractice-based system to a workman's compensation system with expert inquiry. The American political system is not a system supportive of swift change, hence the reason why we should take care now to improve upon the system correctly while the issue is present. This being said, both Liberals and Conservatives should drop their independent beliefs that 1. healthcare will happen swiftly to move towards the "single payer" model of health insurance, and that 2. the healthcare system is not now nor will it seem to be in the future a "private sector" industry as approximately half of all costs involving health care are paid for by the government.

Delight In The Ordinary

     Ordinary is what a majority of our daily lives consist of, constantly exposing us to pleasures and pains from our culture and the natural environment around us. It is suggestible, then, that the ordinary is where we find most our our callings, our interests, but also our temptations. This past Easter weekend I was reminded of a sermon delivered by my previous pastor regarding the path to Emmaus, on which we can either lead our lives in the direction away from God towards Emmaus, or towards God in the direction of Jerusalem. Similarly, our experience with the ordinariness of everyday life can lead us further away or closer to God depending on the choices we make. This two sided attribute of ordinariness is something discussed by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, wherein [the devil] Screwtape criticizes his nephew Wormwood in permitting his patient to take pleasure in reading a book simply because he enjoys reading it. This is important because it suggests that important events in life are seldom extraordinary in appearance and are easy to miss, and that it is our daily decisions that affect our moral and spiritual growth. It is as though we are traveling a road toward self-actualization, which could or could not also be considered a path towards perfection and that through the development of our character, or spiritual and moral growth, we are able to or unable to gaze upon the face of God.
      Letting go of our pleasures along the path towards self actualization can be difficult, and therefor quite easy to dismiss in the pursuit of other pleasures and desires. The attempt to hold onto our everyday pleasures eventually crumbles, and leaves us with only ourselves. Retreating further into ourselves, caring only about our own pleasures would take us further way from our own self actualization, and lead us away from God. It is this predicament I find myself currently in, faced by a flux of pleasures and interests I find myself retreating further into my self, gradually falling away to value nothing more than myself rather than other people. There is a tension then, between the natural forms of love we express and our love towards God, and it is the idolization and isolation of these loves that make it so easy to turn us away from our own self-actualization. As a result of this isolation and idolization, we experience the transformation of love as painful, which is probably why few can say they have lived to see their own self-actualization and find themselves on the road to Emmaus. If anything is to be taken from this, for me especially, it is to find truth in the old adage that to take pleasure in the small things now is to look back later on and realize that some of them were the big things that truly do matter.