As a nation embroiled in the debate on healthcare reform, audience members found neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson's words of advice on how to truly create successful health-care reform inspiring, invigorating and spot-on.
With hundreds in attendance at Seattle Pacific University's 14th Annual Downtown Business Breakfast yesterday morning, the room at the Westin Hotel was brimming with ideas on how to improve the future.
"I found it incredibly inspiring and spot-on, the fact that we have to take politics out of it," said attendee Bill McCutcheon. "I'm just so impressed. He's a great role model."
But anxiety was near at hand, as SPU President Philip Eaton said, "We are a nervous nation...these are shaping moments for the American character."
Eaton asked the audience to consider what will be the result of this national debate over health-care reform, and though that question remained unanswered, Carson, who has served as the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine since 1984, noted the current path may not be headed the right direction.
The main problem, as Carson said, is the wrong people are making the decisions and having the discussions.
"If we were serious about health-care reform, we'd get the health-care providers to come up with the solution," Carson said. "It's like asking people who like to talk about building bridges to rebuild a fallen bridge instead of asking engineers to do it."
With the premise that everyone deserves basic health care, the question Carson put to the audience is how to do that in an effective and efficient manner.
To start with, Carson said, "I wish Congress would take this out of the realm of politics and think about it logically."
With the intervention of the middleman, insurance companies, health care no longer seems to be about a relationship between the patient and the health-care provider. That, Carson said, is a problem.
"Now the middleman has become the primary industry. It's a total distortion of health care," Carson said.
When insurance companies remain profit driven, not care-driven, healthcare reform becomes limited, Carson said. Though he didn't talk in specifics, Carson said there is precedence for the government to be responsible for "catastrophic healthcare" support.
The idea is similar to homeowners insurance. Without FEMA, a government entity designed to help in case of natural catastrophes, insurance companies would have to hike premiums to levels that the average person cannot afford. The health-care system has no FEMA equivalent, which has led to millions of uninsured Americans, who can still access health care if they absolutely have to at an emergency room but when they do so it can be financially crippling.
The current system, Carson added, pushes people into emergency rooms for temporary fixes, instead of into clinics where they can receive preventative wellness solutions that ultimately cost less for both patients and the medical industry.
"There's plenty of room for profits," Carson said. "However, one has to be logical and put rules in lace to keep people's greed from overriding their sensitivity."
Carson spoke later that afteroon at a free assembly at the SPU campus.[[In-content Ad]]
