a lefty’s log

here’s a post i sent to my pal MB. it sparked a debate for which i am not yet at liberty to share the other side. i am at liberty to share this. so i will.

at the risk of sounding like a speaker on a soapbox here, i thought of you when i read this a few weeks ago,

besides confounding the health care crisis with rhetoric about private spending accounts and confusing giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry (called medicare part d), here’s a real innovation:

> 46. The Quick Fix
> Michael C. Howe
> MinuteClinic
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> Welcome to drive-thru health care: It’s conveniently located inside your local Target, CVS pharmacy, or supermarket; it’s quick, cheap, and stays open late and on weekends. Physician assistants or nurse practitioners (not doctors) will diagnose, and prescribe drugs for, the dozen most common ailments–your ear infections, your allergies, etc.–for between $28 and $110 (about half of what you’d pay at a doctor’s office and a fraction of the cost of an ER visit). And no appointment is necessary.
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> When MinuteClinic hired CEO Michael C. Howe last June, the five-year-old company had 22 locations in Maryland and Minnesota; today it runs 90 clinics from Seattle to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and is shooting for 300 in 20 states by year’s end and 800 by 2010. The potential upside in the $1.9 trillion health-care industry seems endless (a growing list of competitors apparently agree).
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> Howe, a former CEO of Arby’s, predicts that his short-order approach will transform the healing arts. He says his run as a sandwich mogul gave him “an appreciation of the importance of the customer, or in this case, the patient.” If it gives you pause to have a roast-beef professional overseeing little Suzy’s lab results, know that after 360,000 patient visits, MinuteClinic reports a 99% satisfaction rate. And Dr. Stephen Schoenbaum, executive vice president for programs at the Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan health-care grant-making and research tank, gives the clinics a qualified thumbs-up: “My one concern would be continuity” of care, he says. But “our health-care system at the moment is so fragmented that [continuity] is only a small component in a very large problem.”
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> –Anya Kamenetz
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the only better solution is for a real leader to cast/frame the healthcare debate as an intelligent, and sustainable form of protectionism: by way of a nationalised, publicly funded system. that and a true, relavent public education system will do much more to shore up our nation for the future against bad guys and ourselves.

the think is, how do i bend the ear of the power players with this vital info?

thanks for listening.

–lefty

for another take on the thing, here’s a news tidbit i heard whilst staying up all hours of the night last weekend, watching pbs:

massachusetts has a state-funded heathcare plan?

i haven’t read the art yet, this is the first time i found anything in writing about it since i heard it friday, but it looks promising. . . . and it’s a conservative’s plan! that’s the way to do it: make it a matter of ethics and national security, two things the social conservatives and the soccer moms can really wrap their arms around. . . .