CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER REFORMER
A Widow Bit - Sept. 2, 2009
By Mary Koch

            I recant. I withdraw all I’ve said and written for the past 25 years about how this nation needs to reform its health care system.

            I joined the campaign in the 1980s, when as a weekly newspaper editor I was overwhelmed by a constant barrage of medical hard-luck stories. Every week there was yet another community effort to raise money to help someone in medical need. We were fighting cancer with raffles, buying transplants with bake sales, funding brain surgery with spaghetti feeds.

            Finally, when an uninsured friend (she worked in her mother’s small business) needed cancer treatments, a group of us got together, not only to raise money on her behalf but to protest lack of access to medical care.

            Ah, to be naïve again. We launched a petition drive seeking improved health care access. I personally delivered an impressive wad of signatures to then-U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, whose disinterest bordered on disdain. In his defense, there were only about 33 million uninsured Americans at that time, in contrast to today’s 48 million or so.

            But I was hooked. I joined the Association of Health Care Journalists. I invited a policy expert to town and snagged friends to listen. I harangued in print. I preached a sermon at my church arguing that health care reform is a moral issue. (The Institute of Medicine claims that each year more than 18,000 people in the U.S. die because they had no health insurance – that’s higher than our annual homicide rate.)

            I gave up reading murder mysteries in favor of books on health care policy issues. They’re scarier. Most recent: “Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer” by Shannon Brownlee.

            I’m going back to murder mysteries. It’s clear “whodunit” to American health care reform. At the beginning of the year, a large majority of Americans claimed they wanted fundamental changes. Now folks are fleeing the reform camp faster than a pot grower scampering from his field when the government helicopter arrives.

            The problem? Too many of us have pretty good insurance and care. Expensive, yes. But we’re willing to suck it up – or let our employer or Medicare suck it up. Reform means change, and people look forward to change with about as much delight as a root canal.

            James Surowiecki, financial columnist for The New Yorker magazine, explains: “Behavioral economists have established that we feel the pain of losses more than we enjoy the pleasure of gains. So when we think about change we focus more on what we might lose rather than on what we might get.”

            Media demagogues didn’t need behavioral economists to tell them that. They’re playing the fear card to the hilt. The political environment has gotten so toxic that at this point, any health care remodel will more likely be a remuddle.

            Improving the system is not impossible. Other nations have figured it out. Longevity and cost data show dozens of countries are doing it better. (Read “The Healing of America” by T.R. Reid, but oh-no. I forgot. Murder mysteries from now on.)

            We don’t want to be confused by facts. So I say, give us what we want: more of the same. Of course in this case, more will mean less.