But it must!!! I agree that the time is now to attempt to deal with this immense problem. There won’t be another opportunity in my lifetime, maybe not in the lifetime of our children and grandchildren to fix this mess, and meanwhile health care will become more and more of a drag on the nation’s economy. All the crises facing the Obama Administration are complicated and don’t lend themselves to easy solutions, but this one is the most complicated thus far. Why?
Financing Not On Firm Footing
One reason is the nonproductive way in which health care is paid for in this country. The system assumes a fully employed population with employers footing the bill. Right now, however, we have unemployment approaching 9% in some areas. Who pays for the 9% out of work? And why should employers have to shoulder the responsibility in the first place? Employers need to be investing in expanding existing businesses to increase employment opportunities, They should be investing in research and new product development. They should be investing in improving existing products and keeping prices competitive. They should not be burdened with having to foot the bill for the nation’s health care system.
And what about the cost of health care in the United States? It changes hourly. Everyone wants to reap the benefits of the nation’s health care research and development efforts, which is a huge complicated endeavor. Nothing is to be accomplished by pointing some finger of blame at the nation’s pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is doing what we want them to do. We want them to save our lives, and that’s what they are attempting to do. Oh yes, they're also making a lot of money in the process.
We have an extremely health care greedy population. No one wants to die. Everyone wants to postpone the inevitable for as a long as possible. Everyone wants to live forever, and we expect to enjoy the benefits of our thriving medical research and development activities forever.
In the laboratory a researcher comes up with a yet another technique that appears promising for curing cancer. Let’s take the case of the technique for growing human cancer attack spores on tobacco plants for attacking cancer, which I have written about previously.
Researchers Need Compensation
The pharmaceutical firms are willing to allow a few researchers to conduct such speculative research, but they expect to be compensated for staff time and benefits. This is a fairly new effort, not long on the books. The research shows promise , and so now it is time to test the technique in the field. The services of several more staff are required. We are leaving out issues like the compensation of patients who allow themselves to be used as guinea pigs.
Now lets add several degrees of further complication by looking at all the specialties in all of medicine. All the researchers working at all the pharmaceutical and medical research facilities in all these fields want what they consider fair access to the research and development dollars available.
Enormous Management Challenge
How do you manage such a huge field with so many competing interests and one that is in a constant state of flux? Part of the challenge is the mere fact that the field since it is requiring taxpayers dollars in the first place needs managing at all. Then there are so many stake holders, not just all the U.S. users of health care. Major stake holders like all the physicians and all the nurses and all those in the medical technical specialties. And how about the medical equipment engineers and all the designers and builders of all the equipment like scanners, etc., and all the medical insurance interests?
What an enormous undertaking!
Infuriating Case of Bernard Madoff
Another topic that has my attention is the infurating story of Bernard Madoff, who bilked many people out of sizable amounts of money using the notorious Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi investment scheme people are lured into placing their money with the expectation that their initial investments will be turned into much more money, the result of the brilliant investment strategies on the part of the operator of the investment enterprise.
In fact, the operator’s so called “brilliant investment strategies” are the result of taking new contributor’s money and turning it back to veteran contributors in the form of so-called dividends. In other words, a Ponzi scheme has no real assets. Only the continued gullibility of new investors keeps it going. When the lack of true assets is revealed, the whole scheme falls apart like a collapsing house of cards, and everyone who placed money with the scheme operator is a loser.
What Makes Him Tick?
I don’t know Bernie Madoff at all, but I can’t help wondering about the man. What makes Bernie Madoff tick? Is he merely a greedy and heartless schemer? At least one person who lost a fortune to Madoff is reported to have committed suicide. If you are Madoff, how do you live with that fact?
I want to believe that he started out with the best of intentions, but perhaps I am cutting him too much slack. Rotten to the core—that may be the Bernard Madoff that we have seen in the media. Still I want to believe otherwise. He starts out with the best of intentions, but then the pressure to appear successful takes over. Bernier Madoff was smarter than everyone else. Right? Bernie Madoff didn’t disappoint other people, especially not if they enjoyed positions of power and leadership in their respective fields. Right? Not if they are someone like Steven Spielberg, famed Hollywood moviemaker. How can you submit a monthly investment report to the likes of Steven Spielberg and not show a continued record of success?
Reputation to Uphold, Right?
Imagine the self-imposed pressures on this man to continue to show a record of brilliance as a manager of other people’s money? He had a reputation to uphold, right?
Such is the mess we get ourselves intro when at core we are not honest with ourselves or with others—when we have no mechanism for dealing honestly with ourselves and others, when honesty is no part of our personal ethos. We are a crook through and through. We squander other people’s fortunes. People, once friends, commit suicide because of us.
I have written about this before, especially in my poetry. At heart relations between all of us are based on intangible virtues like trust. No amount of government-imposed regulation frees us from that reality. We can all take advantage of misplaced confidence if we have an inclination to lie, to cheat, to not tell the truth. Trust is the indispensable virtue. Trust is everything.
Thank you for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. Links to the publisher Xlibris can be found on the sasaft website.
Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Alan Saft
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