National healthcare is only the first step
If healthcare demands can strain things badly in a small, urbanized state like Massachusetts, what will it be like in the Southern states that are mostly rural, or the vast wide open states that grow bigger, the wester you go?
Clearly, it will also require carefully crafted school loan forgiveness programs to redistribute the docs and fresh financial aid programs to increase the doc supply. It will likely also require reqwritten rules and training so more physician assistants and nurse practitioners can do preventive care stuff like physicals.
Each will have to pass through a contentious Congressional debate so it could be 2014 before all the kinks are worked out in the new medical care system. And the focus, initially, should be on the development of efficiency and timeliness of care. Cost controls should be the final piece to the puzzle, because early impositions of that will limit the chances of making it effective, ever.
The social service net that arose from LBJ’s Great Society initiatives came with inefficiencies and disparities built in because of the political concerns attached by Congressmembers who were opposed to the whole concept. It will take a leader who can motivate the public to lean on legislators to limit that dilutive impact.
And, of course, it will first take electing a Democrat to the White House or there’ll be no healthcare plan at all.
