Is health care a right or a privilege? Should government be more or less involved? Perspectives abound among all groups involved: patients, doctors, hospitals, health insurers, the pharmaceutical industry, legislators.
Most would agree that the needs of the uninsured represent a top priority for reform. Perhaps the experience of an entity devoted to addressing those needs for the last six years might be insightful….
I had a friend who ran a health care clinic like this out of his garage in northern Vermont, but this one seems better organised and has more depth. The concept is a good one — and it’s a non-government approach as well, which I count as a huge plus.
One of the very few things about health care in Canada — I lived there for 20 years — that’s worth developping here in the States are the Local Community Health Centres for absolute front-line basic health care.
What’s interesting about this effort in South Carolina is that it has developped into something very like that, and there are several others operating there as well. These happen to be volunteer free clinics, supported by industry and volunteer medical people.
My father-in-law (a Hungarian refugee pathologist) would just love to do that sort of thing, but when he retired and moved from Chicago to Florida the state licensure requirements were daunting — Illinois didn’t count … so that’s one area in which I think government could develop a low-cost high-leverage change in regulations.
Interestingly, similar clinics are popping up within Wal-Mart and some Walgreen’s store. It’s a $40 clinic visit with a Nurse Practitioner — who is authorised to write prescriptions. Takes care of all the basic stuff, including simple stitches and obvious diagnoses. Most of the prescriptions are for generics at 4 bucks over in the store’s pharmacy area. More complicated stuff is immediately referred and arrangements are made right there for higher level treatment as needed.
What I like about the entire concept — whether the Drydocks Clinic in the story, a Wal-Mart clinic, or Ron’s garage — is that it addresses a very real issue without attempting to create a false “right” to health care and a huge (well-paid) bureaucracy to guarantee that “right.”
With the exception of trial by jury, no genuine right requires anyone to do anything other than to leave someone else alone.
[url=http://www.gmfreeclinic.org/]How it can be done without the government[/url]
We call them Rural Health Clinics where I live here in the Central Valley.
Lots of merit here. But… would we require physicians to volunteer? After all, if it’s so easy, why hasn’t this been done?
What would most likely happen in states that tried to cut costs down would be exactly this: make the incentives better care, not fee for service. In either case, the market is on the back burner.