Introduction Whenever you bring up the subject of healthcare today, whether to doctors or to patients, you immediately get an earful. You'll hear about the greedy, heartless HMOs; the growing difficulty in getting health insurance (whether you're employed or not); the distracted, money-grubbing doctors; and the overly demanding and increasingly litigious patients. Yet, despite this litany of grievances, you will find it strangely difficult to put your finger on what, exactly, the real problem is. For underlying these more concrete complaints you will perceive something else - the stirrings, expressed in vaguely wistful tones, of a more fundamental problem. And if you listen carefully, what you'll hear is the expression of a deep, if poorly defined, sense of loss.
The sense of loss is genuine. Because something is being lost, and it's something important, something vital, something necessary to the integrity of any healthcare system. It's far more than just a patient's freedom to choose his own physician, or to see a specialist when he wants to. And it's far more than just a doctor's freedom to practice medicine as she sees fit. What we're losing, we doctors and patients, is the sanctity of our relationship with one another.
Wait - don't go.
I promise I'm not going to get all warm and fuzzy about the importance of relationships. For, while the relationship between patients and their doctors can be warm and fuzzy, it usually isn't, doesn't need to be, and is often stronger if it's not. It's not a relationship based on feelings of affection, like those between friends or lovers. Instead, it's a relationship more like that between allies fighting a war. It's a relationship based on mutual dependence and trust - on mutual survival, in fact. We, doctors and patients, allow this relationship to weaken only at our own peril.
And that, it turns out, is the heart of the problem. The traditional doctor-patient relationship, so vitally important to all of us, is being systematically and methodically destroyed.
When you understand why and how this is so, then all the pieces of the healthcare puzzle instantly fall into place. Previously inexplicable events become not only logical, but predictable. And potential solutions to our healthcare crisis, both long term and short term, immediately begin to materialize. More importantly, you'll quickly see what kinds of things you need to do to protect yourself whenever you need medical care.
This synthesis is derived from what I humbly call the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare - the theory that explains everything.
Any theory that explains everything, as one might imagine, will be pretty comprehensive, and the Grand Unification Theory is that. Accordingly, I have laid it all out, quite comprehensively in my book, Fixing American Healthcare - Wonkonians, Gekkonians, and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare. But the purpose of this website is not to regurgitate an entire book at you. Rather, it's to quickly bring you up to speed on what you're facing whenever you're in the clutches of our healthcare system, so that you can learn how to protect yourself.
Accordingly, on this website we're going to pull out of the Grand Unification Theory what you really need to know to survive the American healthcare system. And to this end I offer you, right here, two pathways to enlightenment.
The first is the five-minute pathway , for those of you who have no patience for discourse, but instead want (or need) to get to the bottom line right away. Perhaps, for instance, surgery is scheduled for tomorrow. Here, I'll just tell you what you absolutely need to know; namely, a series of five simple assertions, presented as revealed truths and without much in the way of explanation or proofs. If you're willing to simply accept these five assertions, you'll be able to move on to the Surviving It section of this website with no further ado. But I'll be worried about you. For if you're willing to accept my arbitrary assertions at face value, then what's to keep you from accepting the assertions presented to you - in an equally arbitrary and take-it-or-leave it manner - by those who peddle their wares in the American healthcare system?
Most, I believe, will find the second pathway more satisfying. Here we will reach the same conclusions, but we will develop those conclusions in a way that is much more convincing, straightforward and (I hope) entertaining. The second pathway comprises the bulk of the information available in the Understanding It portion of this website. If you'll spend an hour or so with this pathway, you will not only be able to recite the fundamental problems with American healthcare, but you will also really understand those problems, as well as their true and profound implications. And you'll have a much firmer grasp on how to convert that understanding into a definite plan of action for your own encounters with the healthcare system.
Finally, there is of course a third pathway. (There are always three pathways to enlightenment.) That third pathway would be for you to read the book. In addition to an even more developed version of the information presented in the first and second pathways, the book paints the whole picture, developing as it does a model to describe the fundamental characteristics of All Possible Health Care Systems. It shows why our current American system (given a bit more time) may become one of the worst of all imaginable healthcare systems. But more importantly, it reveals what an "ideal" American healthcare system might look like, and shows what we would need to do to get there. I dearly hope that some of you will choose this third pathway.
But you don't need to. The first or second pathway (but especially the second), fully contained and available to you at no charge right here at GUTHealthcare.com, will tell you what you really need to know. Once you understand what's really going on, you'll be ready to maximize your odds of surviving the American healthcare system.
So, choose your pathway (Pathway 1 Pathway 2), become enlightened, and stay alive.
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