A healthcare reformation

None of this will be easy. Powerful forces will align to stop the creation of a patient-empowering healthcare marketplace. All the necessary players-patients, doctors, and entrepreneurs-will need to persist in their efforts despite increasingly strident, desperate, and threatening attempts by Wonkonians and Gekkonians (but especially Wonkonians) to stop them and to denounce them as elitist, criminal, and immoral. The covert rationing establishment is at least as entrenched (and corrupt) as the early sixteenth-century Church; the notion of patients becoming self-empowered is at least as frightening as the notion of the teeming masses communicating directly with God; physicians answering only to their patients is at least as threatening as renegade priests answering to parishioners; and empowering technologies are at least as heretical as printing the Bible in the vernacular. The coming fight will resemble nothing, in terms of its intensity and potential for acrimony (and worse), so much as the Reformation.

Most of us will enter the fray not to become reformers but rather to protect ourselves, our families, our professional legitimacy, and our businesses from a broken healthcare system-that is, for ostensibly selfish reasons. To survive the attacks that will come our way, we need to remind ourselves of the higher cause we are serving.

Is what we're doing unfair? It is not. It would be difficult to imagine a healthcare system more unfair and inequitable than the one we have now, in which money is being taken from the paychecks of workers to pay for the healthcare of others, when they themselves have no health insurance; in which deceptions, half-truths, outright lies, and coercion are routinely employed by the central authorities entrusted with managing the healthcare system; in which the interests of doctors have been systematically divorced from the interests of their individual patients; and in which patients are left to fend for themselves, without their rightful advocates, at a time when they are least capable of doing so, within a confusing and dangerous healthcare system. What we are doing-learning to protect our own rights and welfare, in the process exposing the truth of covert rationing, and establishing the systems and methods for others to follow-is restoring, not destroying, equity.

Is what we're doing immoral? It is not. By insisting on our right to self-determination, we are reestablishing a foundational American principle that has eroded in recent years in part because of covert rationing. By taking the steps necessary to empower ourselves and to enable that same empowerment for others, we are asserting our right to self-determination in matters related to our own personal needs. It is an American birthright. Others are trying to take it away. We are stopping them.

If we allow this attack on our ideals to go unanswered or if we fight back and lose, we will pay a much higher price than a bad healthcare system. This is why we owe it to ourselves and to future generations of Americans to take up the cause.

We need to recognize covert rationing for what it is. We need to shine a bright light into the dark corners where it lurks. We need to point to it, call it by its name, illuminate its methods and reveal its secret language. We need to show what it is afraid of-truth, equity, and the intrinsic worth of the individual.

The shrillness of the cries and the brazenness of the protests against our efforts at self-empowerment should be recognized for what they are - signs of just how far we've already fallen away from those founding ideals and of how close the idea of individual empowerment strikes at the heart of the enemy. If anything, these protests should steel our resolve. We are fighting for our own rights and welfare, but we are also fighting a battle to restore every American's right to self-determination. It won't be easy. But we are not sinners; we are holy warriors.