Big Government and Big Corporate Roles in Health Care
One thing that will never change – human beings are each unique individuals made in the image and likeness of God – “endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” When designing any kind of health care system, this truth must be paramount.
Our present health care system developed from gradual improvements in individual treatment. As observation, testing and research revealed common pathways to treatment, companies rose to offer new technologies, equipment and devices to make treatment safer, better and less intrusive. In most cases, this has worked to meet the hurting individual’s needs.
I’m all for gathering data, comparative analysis and whatever technology can bring to the fight against disease and misery. My life was certainly spared 8 years ago after a stage 4 diagnosis leading to a cure from Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I get uncomfortable with “group-think” when it comes to health care. The exceptions are where population groups share a similar malady that can be dealt with communally. In the case of employer provided health insurance, the typical company has a diverse population and is a proper subsidiary link in the chain.
Microsoft and GE have seldom demonstrated a bottom up view of anything they do, including pushing that horrendous Common Core and moving health care equipment manufacturing to China. Since they are dealing with products and technology it is their proper role to serve the individual through the various subsidiary levels of health care.
This includes those entities like churches, synagogues and philanthropic groups which are properly dedicated to the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. These community level elements, including employers are then free to put an emphasis on a particular illness by financial donations through appropriate private entities.
When I was Safety Engineer for a Silicon Valley electronics company, we lost an employee to electrocution in my first 5 days on the job. This brought about test stand safety measures, but also a cooperative program with the local Red Cross chapter to install the first employee CPR program in the nation. Two of my safety team returned from summer vacations having saved a life.
The question is, are they creating systems serving the individual in a subsidiary manner or creating convenient groupings that can actually create dangerous divisions? Select groupings in the hands of eugenicists in the spirit of Margaret Sanger or her heir apparent, ACA architect Zeke Emanuel can easily be set aside for experimentation, no treatment or euthanizing. It happened in 1938 Austria after Hitler took over the then finest health care system in the world. It’s happening here as people finally discover what’s in the ACA.
How is this accomplished? It’s mostly a matter of priorities. Following subsidiarity and solidarity, the Federal Government does have a role in health care – Insurance for catastrophic care, just as in meeting natural disasters – big and short term. The role of the family, community, local doctors and hospitals are the front line. These must be allowed freedom of action from insurance providers and regulatory bodies following the moral and ethical norms of these traditional front line providers.
Microsoft and GE have free enterprise roles in offering well designed systems and equipment to meet the everyday and extraordinary. Where they have or are colluding with the Federal Government violates subsidiarity and can only lead to a top down decidedly fatal system. GE can continue to compete in the medical equipment marketplace as competition always yields product and system improvement and cost reductions. Fascist alliances with government are always ultimately dangerous or stultifying to real progress. Few software firms have the depth of experience in their field as Microsoft. Though large, they are not always the best. Microsoft or Apple or Cisco or whoever can certainly design a medical care software system that honors the sanctity of the human life of the individual while staging ever more professional and advanced treatment methodologies.
As Dr. Ravi Patel of Bakersfield’s Comprehensive Blood and Cancer Center told me as I entered treatment for my stage 4 cancer: “It takes faith, attitude and good medicine – in that order – to be healed of cancer.” One year later, God and I proved him right. We should expect no less from those who seek to restructure our health care system.
Gerald V. Todd
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Disclaimer: the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Principia Scientific International.
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