Start With Kids; Their Providers are Nice
In devising the P.S.Y.C.H. plan, I've run into quite a few folks who say, "Oh my god, Americans would never go for this."
And I agree wholeheartedly. Trying something drastically different that affects Americans' pocketbooks that they can't immediately digest would take a miracle (and I'm no Steve Jobs).
We are a people that need to "test the waters" first. And while typically our children are not test subjects, I think they'd be the perfect way to pilot a universal health delivery system, mainly because who wouldn't want to cover children? Who wouldn't want to provide them with the most efficient, quality, and financially responsible health care possible? Who wouldn't want to utilize preventative health care in the best way – on an organism that morphs into a tax-paying, consuming adult?
In the health care paradigm, the three pillars are patients, providers, and places. For Pediatric P.S.Y.C.H., the patients are easy to wrangle since the law puts us in charge of making health care decisions for them. The places are fairly straightforward; there aren't many children's hospitals that we'd have to negotiate with, and quite a few of them (Scottish Rite, Shriners) already have their own version of this. It's the providers – the PNPs, the MDs/DOs, the PAs, the pediatric dentists, surgeons, ophthalmologists, the physical, speech, and occupational therapists, etc.
P.S.Y.C.H.'s ace in the hole is that most providers who have chosen a field involving pediatric patients are altruistic, sometimes to a fault. We work overtime because we love what we do, and we worry all the time about the care of the kids we serve. And I have an inkling that each one of us would gladly take a reasonable financial hit in order to create a universal health delivery service for children that promoted prevention, gave providers autonomy, and reestablished the provider-patient/family relationship.
When we run the metrics, we can extrapolate to the other stages of the plan. So our answer is obvious: create Pediatric P.S.Y.C.H. Who's ready?