Getting Directions

Avenue or Street? Name or Number? Four quick details and you can find your way around in Phoenix in minutes. Numbered roads run north and south. If that numbered road is also a street, such as 24th Street, then it is on the east side of town. 19th Avenue is on the west side. Indian School Road runs east and west. A perfect grid, Phoenix is easy to navigate.

Have you ever tried to explain how to get from Westlake to University Heights?

The Phoenix grid was designed first. The city of Phoenix was built within that framework. Greater Cleveland is very different. Our communities are linked by our roads. Our street system, with its twists and turns, traffic circles, and five point intersections, is organic, reactive, and responsive. New Brainard Road quickly comes to mind.

I think about our lack of north - south streets and the joy of an efficient grid every time I am stuck in traffic on Richmond Road. We have all dreamed of a better way to get around town. We just have to decide which neighborhoods to bulldoze.

Creating a health care delivery system where none existed is a lot like planning a city's grid. With limited expectations and little to disrupt, the new program would face little opposition.

Think about the delivery and payment of health care in the US. Our system is organic and ever changing. Part action, part reaction, we have evolved from a system of community hospitals and doctor/entrepreneurs to regional medical centers who employ entire teams of professionals.

Just as the medical providers have changed, so too have the payers. Blue Cross and Blue Shield associations were originally created by doctors and hospitals as a means for the patients to prepay for medical services. Health insurance quickly followed. Over the last seventy years we've moved from indemnity policies to Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO), Preferred Provider Organizations (PPO), and even the occasional Point of Service Plan (POS). Insurers now research everything from the most efficient ways to deliver health care to drug interaction and disease management.

Medicare brought the federal government into our system. Almost overnight, Washington went from uninvolved to a key player. Medicare pays the majority of the cost for the care of our elderly and infirm. The government decides how much it will pay for a doctor's exam,test, or hospital stay. Less than the insurance companies, less than the self-pay, government payments are accept or reject. The medical provider either accepts Medicare and its rules, its limitations, and its millions of beneficiaries, or he/she doesn't. Most providers accept Medicare.

Providers, insurers, and governmental changes have significantly impacted the way health care is practiced in this country. In many ways we have lost sight of who pays for medical services.

There are commercials on TV for diabetic testing devices, lift chairs. and scooters that are FREE if you are on Medicare. They aren't free. We are paying, probably over-paying, for all of this.

Like a drive down Van Aken Boulevard, Congress is discovering that our health care delivery system isn't a simple north-south or east-west. The New York Times reported on April 26, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/health/policy/27care.html?_r=1&th&emc=th that the shortage of primary care physicians is just one more unanticipated obstacle on the path of change. Our current system rewards specialists. A revenue neutral option would lower the reimbursements for specialists, freeing up money for the general practitioners. Needless to say, the orthopedic surgeons are not happy.

Action and reaction. Raise compensation? Add more doctors? The one thing most of us know for sure is that we can't tear down our existing system and start over from scratch. So as we debate change and what the final results will be, we must be certain that we don't neglect to map the road from where we are to that final goal.

DAVE

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