The Some Rings

Whose Job Is It?

a long time ago, at least in my terms, ezra klein and i blogged together. since then, he’s become one of the growing movement’s more impressive writers, especially on the controlled by of health care.

He writes today, in reference to a question posed by fellow wunderkind Matthew Yglesias,

Psychological wednesday society

solitary of the important problems in haleness care is the power of the professional guilds. that’s true for the treatment of doctors, surgeons, dentists, orthopedists, etc, etc, etc. conveyance system reform is, as matt points entirely, Dialect right important, but no only, not the insurers and not the government, regard clever to pick a huge fight with these groups, as the public actually likes them. so everyone sort of tiptoes around these issues, because no one really sees a path forward.

This is one of the reasons that I support MinuteClinics and other basic care offerings (much to the consternation of some readers) run by nurse practitioners. Not every health problem requires a full doctor, and I’d like to see doctor’s office compete and adapt in a world in which patients have the option to bring their low level problems to cheaper, more customer service oriented providers.This is all fascinating. Doctors (and nurses and dentists and insurance companies and hospitals and politicians and unions) will all be key in any fight to reform health care, but one of the problems here is that with all of these groups but one (politicians), it isn’t actually their job to fix our health care system.

That doesn’t mean that they operate in bad faith or that they don’t try to have all of our best interests at heart. It’s just that — like all of us — they have a limited perspective, limited by their own interaction with the world.

My friend Jefferson Smith, founder of the Oregon Bus Project (Forward Montana’s sister org in that fine state) and candidate for Oregon’s State House, often likes to ask whose job it is to fix health care or reform our education system or reinvent the structure of our energy economy. Right now, it isn’t really anyone’s job.

It is, instead, the job of most political actors to either focus on a very narrow issue set or to represent their members’ own financial interests. In the words of Jeff, this isn’t wrong or evil, but it is incomplete.

And if we’re going to fix these problems, we need to spend some time trying to get past our own narrow issue interests and our own narrow financial interests — not because those things aren’t important (they are!), but because on their own, they aren’t enough.

That’s a big part of what the Oregon Bus was founded to do — and it’s a big part of what Forward Montana tries to do.

Tonight, at Candidates Gone Wild, we were fortunate to have at least a bit of a bipartisan crowd despite a very non-bipartisan candidate field (we invited all the folks in contested primaries, but Tim Fox and Lee Bruner had a scheduling conflict, unfortunately). Now — to a large extent, I understand why folks with whom I disagree don’t want to be part of something that I’m a part of. But I’m also grateful every time someone from “across the aisle” takes a step of good faith and shows up — so those handful of Republicans who joined us, thank you. We’ll be bringing back Candidates Gone Wild this fall — hopefully in a far more inclusive way. The idea is to mix levity and seriousness, make politics more approachable. In such a setting, it’s possible — we think — that we can all spend a little more time listening and less time arguing — and just maybe we can learn something from one another. Also — I got to wear a teletubby costume tonight and generally make a fool of myself. That was awesome.

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This entry was posted on Sábado, Mayo 3rd, 2008 at 11:26 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.