The Healthcare Quagmire

The complex and enduring nature of America's healthcare crisis makes voters doubtful if there can truly be a solution to the quagmire. They've seen and heard ideas tossed around for more than a decade, with little progress to show for them.

Professor Bryan Liang, executive director of California Western’s Institute of Health Law Studies, feels that Sen. Hilary Clinton's failure to solve the healthcare problem years ago when she had the chance could hurt her chances of winning the election. "But that failure could also help her," he claims. "Perhaps her past experience has created her new plan, which is just as bad. Muddling in the middle of the road gets nowhere fast."

Liang, a health law and policy expert, holds a medical degree from Columbia, a Ph.D. in public policy from The University of Chicago, and a law degree from Harvard. "None of the candidates have had the courage," he continues, "to sustain a workable solution that takes into account the realities of the need for everyone to be in one system, standardization of treatments and information collection, more evidence-based practice, and making systems resilient to medical errors to improve safety."

Liang sees quite a political challenge ahead for all the candidates. "I don't think any of the proposed healthcare solutions will work," he says. "The candidates are challenged to say they favor increased access to care via universal healthcare solutions to draw voters from the left, while also claiming competition and use of private enterprise to appease those on the right. But this is a zero sum game. The problem is that without universal health coverage, there will still be the incentive to avoid the sick by private insurers - and the sick will become sicker, fill the emergency rooms, and have increased costs that we will all have to pick up anyway."