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Health Care Reform: Can we crowdsource the solution?

Posted by JILL MILLER ZIMON in Health.
Jun 10th, 2009 | Comments

Making Medicine Smarter is a new website that invites visitors to review numbers and research and then propose solutions to the problems they see. The effort is funded by Medco and describes the site as follows:

Medco has built this site to advance the dialog on healthcare reform. Because we feel that fixing healthcare is not about spending more, but spending smarter. Because smarter simply makes healthcare better.

Given that President Obama is avoiding the Clinton era of health care reform’s approach (in which they told Congress what they wanted, down to every detail), and Congressional members themselves are battling through campaign donation and special interest ties to figure out what all their constituents want and need, the solutions might as well come from us.

Here’s a recent, intersting story about Medco’s role in health care right now.

Disclaimer: I know the website designers who alerted me to the launch and are hoping people will start contributing ideas. Otherwise, I have zero connection to the project, and I certainly don’t have any solutions for health care at the moment – I was totally against managed care in the 1990s to begin with. It always seemed like a total waste of money and a step intended to create an entire new business sector for profit opportunities that had nothing to do with actually administered care.

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mikkel

It'll be interesting to see if this generates any good ideas. It's in the vein of people taking things into their own hands, and may be a precursor to what I think may arise if the laws are changed a bit -- non-profit insurance collectives similar to credit unions.

Jillmz

Totally agree. Billhop and a few other similar efforts have tried to see if they can translate keen interest in a topic to actually engagement and then thinking (heaven forbid! /sarcasm) about solutions, all online. We know there's a reading audience, but what proportion is really interested in solving things, putting themselves out there with ideas, etc., you know?

I tend toward optimism, that if given the chance and friendly tools, people will contribute. But you never know! Sometimes people only want to complain - they don't actually want anything to be done.

DLS

"[W]hat proportion is really interested in solving things, putting themselves out there with ideas, etc., you know?"

It's been large, but it's premature to act now because of the state of the economy, which preoccupies people in the know. Obama's not waiting, and has dispatched his campaign foot soldiers to make household, etc., visits (in person is better than on-line, as was true with campaigning in 2008), but this seems to be reckless if not also impatient or even conceited. Plus the effort (in whatever form) is clumsy. Why don't they not only wait for economic improvement first (the intelligent, mature thing to do, when it becomes more propitious), and they try for what is not only simpler (i.e., better) than the current piecemeal, and "transparently insidious" goal of a public "option" (with fake "free market" choice claims to follow to support public shifting to public from private sources), but to go straight to "Medicare for All"? (Not only is this a vast increase in spending any way it is done, which should wait for economic improvement, but even more, the problem of large new taxes to pay for it must be presented and solved.)

It's a large proportion of the public that wants health care reform, and this will last in strength (persist) after the economy improves (which is when logically and properly it should _then_ be addressed).

Jillmz

DLS - interesting - hard to see the prematurity of it given the length of time we've known how problematic the system is. Are you saying it's premature just in terms of Obama's term? Maybe - but then there are those who think that the earlier he starts the better. Not sure myself.

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