Healthcare Experts? Suddenly Everyone is...

Healthcare used to be a boring topic

Before all the discussion and debate in Washington about healthcare reform I could never find a taker to discuss the business side of our domestic healthcare system. When people asked me questions about how we were reimbursed or how the insurance industry and Medicare worked they were often perplexed or disinterested at the answer. There was little public debate or discussion about the issue – it was, quite simply, a plodding, boring system that few were interested in.

Not anymore…now everyone is a healthcare expert

I have heard more uninformed commentary about our healthcare system in the last six months than one should be subjected to in a lifetime. More anecdotal evidence passed off as fact, more opinion preached as gospel, more pundits have anointed themselves experts – it’s a mess and the airwaves are filled with bad information.

“In other countries healthcare is completely FREE!” “Yeah, but you have to wait 6 years for a doctors appointment.” Ignorance isn’t limited to one ideology or another, it exists in spades on both sides of the debate, with my real fear being how much miss-information is being passed off as fact by people who should know better.

If you’re listening to a debate on the issue and weighing sides, please take the experience and expertise of those discussing into consideration. It’s bad enough how little our elected officials know about healthcare, or many of their staffers – after all these are the people crafting laws and policies on the issue…but our society is dominated by the loud voices who jump from issue to issue, and debate to debate, always angling themselves as the experts. They’re not and they will soon move onto a new issue once the healthcare brouhaha dies down.

I look forward to those days…when we can again have intelligent and informed discussion amongst groups of people who are not only concerned, but also informed. For the strength of any debate shouldn’t be in who can shout the loudest or throw the most money around, but who has the most expertise and capacity to discuss the intricacies of the issue at hand. Unfortunately many times those people don’t have the same access to power that fortune and celebrity affords – no matter what the issue is…