Health care culture

Mary Beth Regan dredges up a number of interesting ideas about our health-care system in the Johns Hopkins Public Health magazine. Here's one, from JHU health policy prof Thomas A. LaVeist:

more tightly regimented treatment protocols to level the playing field. "The one place we don't find racial or ethnic disparities in health care is in the active-duty military," he says. "In the military you don't have black culture or white culture, you have 'green' culture," he says.

"When the lifestyles, health care access, and practice are similar, the outcomes are similar," he says. To LaVeist, U.S. experience shows that health care does not flourish when left to a free market. "There are public goods and services that are not optimally distributed by the free market—for example, police services, emergency services and national defense," he says. "Health care may also be one of them."

This reminds me of No Child Left Behind, for better or worse. Some teachers kick and scream because that law, or some small-minded implementations of it, have reduced their professional discretion. Medicine is both better organized and much more professional (in the sense of a learned profession) than education, so I don't know that this particular proposal is going anywhere.

But professionals -- in health care or education or whatever -- who abhor the idea of "more tightly regimented treatment protocols" might want to be involved in profession-based attempts to bridge cultural and economic gaps, rather than fighting efforts to correct them.