If you ask Dr. Steven Spady, there are two important words missing from the nation’s conversation about health reform: “personal responsibility.”
But Spady, a 54-year-old emergency physician in rural Kentucky, can’t talk about the topic right now. He’s too busy caring for people who he says don’t take care of themselves.
“I just had to go take care of man that left our hospital this morning and now has gone and got drunk and will suck up more health care dollars,” Spady wrote in a hurried e-mail late on a recent weeknight.
That same day, he cared for a 358-pound man with diabetes who didn’t take his medication for two days and then stayed up all night playing poker, plus five different people who overdosed on prescription drugs.
“It just makes me very upset when I have to pay more and more taxes to support government health care programs and have to work longer and longer hours to help a lot of people that just don’t seem to care,” he wrote.
It’s not that Spady lacks compassion. He’s been on medical missions to Mexico and Haiti and has donated thousands of hours of free care in the Appalachian community where he’s worked for nearly a quarter century.
But Spady is part of a growing chorus of medical professionals, researchers and ordinary citizens who contend that the touchy topic of individual responsibility has been all but ignored in the debate about how to reform the nation’s health care system — and how to pay for it.
"Seldom does anyone suggest how — or if — the individual's role should be reformed," argued Lisa Herrington, 46, a former health industry administrator who launched a discussion of the topic in May on the blog "Thoughts that Make You Think."
"Having health insurance coverage doesn't make a person healthy. It's what you do with that coverage and your personal choices that make the difference," she added.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32306655/ns/health-health_care/