American healthcare needs to be fixed

If you are a patient you might complain of avaricious HMOs, distracted doctors, or the difficulty of getting decent health insurance. If you’re a doctor you’ll carp about demanding and litigious patients or managed care organizations and government agencies that swamp you with paperwork and won’t let you practice good medicine. If you happen to be a managed care executive or a Medicare official, you will fume over doctors who use too much expensive technology on too many grasping patients - patients who (you’ll mutter) refuse to make lifestyle choices to prevent their expensive illnesses in the first place. If you run a biomedical company, you’ll bemoan the regulators who live only to prevent you from introducing your life-saving inventions to the marketplace. And if you’re one of those regulators, you’ll complain about a fickle public whose whining results in your being constantly hauled before congressional subcommittees, today for rushing unsafe products to market before they are fully tested, tomorrow for delaying the approval of critical medical products for the sake of your self-serving bureaucracy.
Like blind men feeling an elephant, we see the problems troubling the healthcare system as being narrow, well defined, tractable - and personal. We see solutions with a false sense of clarity: to fix healthcare we should institute universal cheap health insurance or pass tort reform or let market forces reign or loosen FDA regulations or tighten FDA regulations. And we have a hard time understanding why the politicians and policymakers refuse to institute whichever simple fix we’ve set our hearts on.