Healthcare Solutions: Think Big

From Ezekiel Emanuel's post, Think Big, at Health Care Watch:

1) “Make no little plans.  They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”  So said Daniel Burnham, the architect and urban planner (and fellow Chicagoan).

In health care, big plans are necessary not only to motivate people but as a matter of sound policy. The health care system is broken. It is not enough to just add more people to a broken system. Health care reform must reorganize the system to deliver higher quality care while keeping costs under control. Incremental change that just covers more people will not be sustainable.

I'm with Mr. Emanuel. Incremental change has its place, most notably in building, in innovating from scratch, in small companies, in generating revenues from new products based on incremental change and doing so with a limited budget.

But...that's not the state of our health care system. It's broken and incrementally increasing the numbers of those punished by the terms of this system...only provides the illusion of a solution, for perhaps political gain, merely delaying the inevitable buildup of pressure for systemic change.

Think Big.