On the ever-busy Change.gov, former Sen. Tom Daschle has posted a video talking about the health care transition team and the comments he’s received. The pick for Health and Human Services Secretary says hearing compelling personal stories is most important for urging legislators to action.
The Galen Institute, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to free-market ideas for health reform, wants to share people’s stories with the Obama transition team. What personal experiences have caused you to wish for consumer-driven changes in the health system? Would you like more options and more control over your health care?
Please share your stories either in comments or e-mail them to amy@galen.org. Let’s give some constructive, substantive feedback.
Soviet health care
kweiss01 Wednesday, December 3rd at 9:37PM EST (link)I’ve actually had quite good health care in the US and I’d hate to see it change, because I spent 7 years of my life in the former Soviet Union and saw the end result of government-run health care.
Imagine a world where doctors don’t know they should wash their hands before surgery. Where nurses are still putting butter on burns and then wrapping them tightly in bandages (and ripping those bandages off days later to cause infections). Where vodka is given as a cure for radiation poisoning. (These are all real examples).
It was all simple stuff, that your average American high school kid knows better than. But the average doc in the USSR didn’t get it.
Why?
Because general ignorance was endemic to the system, just as it’s endemic to all large government bureaucracies. Okay, there were lots of reasons (the government also controlled the education system, the best and the brightest weren’t signing up to become doctors because there was little financial incentive, etc., etc.).
But I told my friends that if push came to shove, to just let me die in the street rather than take me into another hospital where cats were running around to clear out the rats.
God bless American medicine.