Atul Gawande with another fun New Yorker feature on The Heroism of Incremental Care:
Rescue work delivers much more certainty. There is a beginning and an end to the effort. And you know what all the money and effort is (and is not) accomplishing. We don’t like to address problems until they are well upon us and unavoidable, and we don’t trust solutions that promise benefits only down the road.
Incrementalists nonetheless want us to take a longer view. They want us to believe that they can recognize problems before they happen, and that, with steady, iterative effort over years, they can reduce, delay, or eliminate them. Yet incrementalists also want us to accept that they will never be able to fully anticipate or prevent all problems. This makes for a hard sell. The incrementalists’ contribution is more cryptic than the rescuers’, and yet also more ambitious. They are claiming, in essence, to be able to predict and shape the future. They want us to put our money on it.
But our free-market insurance only wants to pay for 15 minutes of it, of course.
As an American surgeon, I have a battalion of people and millions of dollars of equipment on hand when I arrive in my operating room. Incrementalists are lucky if they can hire a nurse.
and
The difference between what’s made available to me as a surgeon and what’s made available to our internists or pediatricians or H.I.V. specialists is not just shortsighted—it’s immoral.
When people think about rationing care, they talk about rationing care to people. About grandma not getting a pacemaker or a new hip. They speak disparagingly about Canada or the UK. What people don’t realize is that we also ration care internally within medicine. We just do it based on RVUs.
Then, at the end, he finishes with some jabs at half-baked plans to repeal the ACA and a powerful somber note:
In this era of advancing information, it will become evident that, for everyone, life is a preexisting condition waiting to happen.