Doctor says vote Obama. The case for.

[cooolandrew]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harold-pollack/obama-public-health-and_b_82553.html



This is my inaugural posting. I should introduce myself by declaring my two reasons for writing. First, I am a strong Obama supporter. Second, I am a public health researcher. I hope to convince Democratic readers to take these concerns seriously in the 2008 campaign. This first posting hits political preliminaries and notes some realities of our deteriorating urban health system pertinent to health reform. In places here, I draw upon a longer and different blog linked here.
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It is easy for researchers to despise the practicalities of a presidential campaign. Healthcare is a colossal, troubled enterprise which touches every interest group in America. Its poor relative, public health, struggles to gain a hearing. The candidates must speak substantively to these issues, but they cannot possibly engage many accompanying complexities.

Citizens listen to experts argue about arcane matters. They watch each candidate and wonder: Does this accomplished and privileged person really understand my needs as a patient, a caregiver, or, in many cases, as a health care provider? Cutting through the hype, what will this candidate actually do that can help me?

I will not dissect competing Democratic health plans. Others have performed this task. Each of the major plans is superior to current practice and to what Republicans propose. Each also an opening bid within a Byzantine legislative process designed to thwart large reforms. I am heartened by the similarity across the plans. Democrats are ready to govern.

SNIP

[silverweb]

1. Excellent.

That was one hell of an inaugural post, Dr. Pollack!

He knows well whereof he speaks, and speaks his case well. This section was especially poignant:

Senator Edwards has spoken eloquently of the two Americas, in health care and other realms. Like many people, I myself straddle both worlds. I am a tenured professor. Yet my wife and I care for her intellectually disabled brother, who is sweet and gentle but who has complex needs and a mischievous streak. Not long ago, he pried the childproof locks off our cabinets and downed a bottle of flavored vitamin chews. My nice job didn't spare us having to wait ten hours in a crowded emergency room.

We rarely stop to consider that we bear witness to avoidable suffering. During that interminable visit, my young daughters watched a woman five feet from us groan for several hours in visible pain before she was seen. Dozens of us looked away in embarrassment as a young woman sobbed hysterically in full public view. Not long afterwards, I dropped my daughter at dance class and stepped into a diner for a coffee. Taped to the door was a flier hawking raffle tickets to pay for someone's cancer care.

These conditions take a toll on health care providers, who work hard every day to care for people under increasingly difficult conditions. It is demoralizing to turn patients away. It is demoralizing to know that the patient in front of you may go bankrupt because she is being harassed by your own hospital over a bill. It is demoralizing to spend hours battling multiple third-party payers over basic care. It is demoralizing to discharge homeless people or drug users to the street because there are no available services. Doctors and nurses -- but also many other health care workers from the administrators and social workers to the licensed practical nurses and orderlies--take pride in their work, I have heard countless professionals say that they can't do the job they were trained to do, that they can't care for people as well as they know they should.

I often wonder how overburdened health care workers carry on when they know that their own health care needs will not be adequately met despite how hard they work. How do they keep their compassion and their humanity day after day after day under those conditions?

Dr. Pollack's right. We need Obama!

GObama! _YES, WE CAN!_