For the first time in America, major organizations are being paid to keep people well. Yet none of these experiments, and none of the defeated reforms, come close to the ideal system that we could build if we put our best minds to it. The experiments each address only a piece of what is a systemic problem. Price caps, managed care, and other legislated controls only distort the system. And hospitals began to specialize in areas that were not defined, such as alcohol rehabilitation and weight loss.
Systems tend to work to defeat simple legislated solutions.
These are far deeper and wider questions, and they lead us in the direction of community and family, of what we eat, how we deal with conflict, with problems of class, education, and true human economics - questions that we have to face if we are ever going to make a healthcare system that works.