A Word About the Headlines

This morning's New York Times carried an article, In Massachusetts, Universal Coverage Strains Care. It is worth a read, especially for anyone who is putting a lot of weight behind a candidate's stance on health care reform this election cycle. For those not in to link clicking, the gist of the article is that Massachusetts is finding itself in a bit of a pickle after mandating health insurance for residents last year. Seems that these folks who are now compelled to fork over premiums for health insurance have this strange notion that they are entitled to see a doctor. Unfortunately, in the rush to eliminate the uninsured, someone forgot to check to make sure there were enough GPs to go around once everyone would be insured. Turns out, there are not. Oops. Bit of an oversight there. The article starts with the anecdotal evidence of a Massachusetts doctor who is taking new patients, as long as those patients can wait 14 months for a checkup. For the patient, that is a year's worth of premiums just to be on a wait ing list for a doctor.

This highlights one of the things that skeeves me about the current political discourse. While I am happy as a clam that the nation is discussing health care, we seem to be conflating "universal health insurance" with "universal health care." As Massachusetts is discovering, the hard way, those two are not interchangeable. Mandating universal health insurance is easy. A few signatures, and you're there. Actually providing universal health care is much more difficult. In addition to signatures, you need trained medical professionals, on the ground and available to the entire population, including the parts of the population that live in the kinds of places I affectionately call "the nation's groin boil." Without doctors who have open appointment slots where the patients are, it doesn't matter how terrific an insurance plan is; the patients will still not have access to health care.