See a photo of Steve, his bio, and Part 1 of this Q&A.
Q&A with Steve Krizman, Question 2:
Q: If you could identify a person or organization who desperately needs to tell a better story, who or what would it be?
A: We need a strong story – or stories — to make our broken health-care system more real to more of us. Facts: The United States pays more per capita on health care than any other country, yet our quality of care is among the worst in the industrialized world. Despite these well-known facts, we fight partisan wars instead of addressing the underlying problems.
We need the equivalent of my gassed dogs story. The problem in Montrose was an overabundance of unwanted strays and lack of concern about the outcome. I could have written an article detailing the problem, but it would not have been as effective as the article that described precisely what became of the dogs that went unclaimed.
The problems with health care are so complex and experienced in different ways by so many people, it is difficult to get a good outrage going. It’s not like there’s TV footage of a broken pipe spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
A recent front-page article in the Denver Postdemonstrates that even when we make the system work better, it’s hard for the story to surface the outrageous problem that is being fixed. The article told how Kaiser Permanente patients who were given technology to e-mail their doctor with daily blood pressure results were much more likely to change their diet and keep their blood pressure within safe limits. As a result, they are 40 percent less likely to have a stroke and 25 percent less likely to have a heart attack. But here’s the underlying, outrageous problem: the vast majority of hypertension patients and their doctors will not soon get access to this technology because the dominant economic model in U.S. health care does not reward the investment. So we go on with 62 percent of hypertension patients letting their blood pressure go through the roof and risking heart attacks and strokes (the treatment of which is covered under our current economic model).
We need more stories that shine the light on things that happen when we haphazardly throw 16 percent of our GNP at an industry and don’t hold anyone accountable for outcomes. Things like post-op infections that are bad for the patient but financially good for the hospital (longer stay, more procedures, more billable hours). Or like losing a limb to diabetes because you are black and that’s just the way the odds play out. Or like hauling your sick self to the doctor’s office for a five-minute look-over instead of a phone consult because the doctor doesn’t get paid unless he/she actually sees you.