[p2p-research] distributed healtcare solutions

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Kevin,

I'm wondering if you had the time or would be inclined to write something up
more formally about distributed healthcare solutions?

Michel


On 2/28/09, Nathan Cravens
<knu...<http://groups.google.com/groups/unlock?_done=/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/2ff5648e44a4da2e/4c096e60dfcdd38f%3Fshow_docid%3D4c096e60dfcdd38f&msg=4c096e60dfcdd38f>
@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you think health care cost is high now wait until you see what
> > government does with it.  Look at Medicare.  Look at the recent Drug
> > plan.    Look at the bills already proposed to have government dictate
> > what kind of care is and is not available on the way to so-called
> > Universal Care.

> In the U.S., the way health care produces health care needs some
examination
> and restructuring to become less wasteful than it is. Many European
> countries provide a model the U.S. can adopt. Bankruptcy and consequent
> government ownership may be what it takes before health care is improved.

The current healthcare system, including the state capitalist drug
companies and hospital chains, is about as "private" and
"market-based" as Boeing and McDonnell-Douglass.  So I wouldn't
exactly cry on my pillow at the prospect of government nationalizing
it as a transitional stage to genuine social ownership.

But leaving healthcare under the administration of something like the
British National Health would be a disaster IMO.  It would just lock
in the hegemony of the existing "professional" cartels, backed up by
even more state force; it would essentially leave in place the entire
pathological institutional culture, but with the bureaucrats working
for the state instead of corporations.

If government takes over, the goal should be to get the facilities in
the hands of neighborhood cooperative clinics, hospital cooperatives
owned by some combination of patients and staff, etc., and to
dismantle the licensing cartels and system of drug patents so that not
one stone is left atop another.

But IMO the chances of such a policy, by the government circles most
in favor of a "universal healthcare," are virtually nil.  A better
route might be corporate bankruptcy followed by cooperative
homesteading on the Argentine model (and reorganization of existing
community nonprofits as stakeholder co-ops), coupled with pressure
from outside to dismantle the licensing cartels and drug patents.

Either way, the end-state system should be decentralized (to the
neighborhood level as much as possible) and cooperatively owned by
patients and staff.  And there should be a free market in tiers of
service, so that if you need (say) somebody to listen to your lungs
and do a sputum culture, and give you a round of Zithro for your
pneumonia, you can hire a free market "barefoot doctor" who's been
trained to provide that level of basic service without paying the
amortization cost of an entire med school education and residency.

Free market advocatres, of the right-wing variety, frequently point
out that if there were food insurance there would be a lot more steak
and a lot less hamburger, and premiums and the cost of food as a share
of GDP would skyrocket.  True, as far as it goes.  The problem is
we've got a system of cartels in place to criminalize buying anything
BUT "steak" when it comes to healthcare.
Whenever well-meaning people call for government to make something
free and universal, the real-world result means that you get the
product government wants to provide whether you want it or not, and if
you try to buy something unauthorized you go to jail.  We've got
"free" and "universal" education, and the practical effect is to put
the system under lockdown by licensed teachers and professional school
administrators (not to mention the institutional culture propagated in
teachers' colleges and education departments), and to crowd out
homeschooling, deschooling, unschooling, cooperative schools, and
alternative and community schools.

-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
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