Law Students

The American health care is broken.  Utterly broken.  It’s not much of a system, but bits and pieces taped together by piecemeal legislations. I came into the health care program feeling quite hopeful that I could help solve this problem. A few years down the line, I’m not feeling so optimistic.

This morning I found myself opposing a novel reform. It sounds really good on the paper. It sounds politically plausible — heck, even I couldn’t point to many flaws in the system — yet something’s gnawing at me. It just sounds too good to be true.

I’m not the only person feeling cynical. We as a class and as a society agree that there’s a problem with the American health care system. However, we disagree as to what the appropriate solution ought to be. To increase equity we may be sacrificing efficiency and unintentionally shrinking the benefits for the whole society. Too much regulation and low-profit will turn people away from the health care business, thus potentially leading to a shortage of providers. Yet leaving the market alone would allow costs to spiral beyond control.

So what to do? Incremental reform? Completely abandon the entire system? I’m not convinced it’s possible to take drastic measures given the strong lobbying power of major health care associations. Will we, the discontent health consumers, be able to do anything else but complain about health care costs, day after day, year after year?