{"id":17293,"date":"2009-09-24T16:06:30","date_gmt":"2009-09-24T23:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stage.headlessnauedu-b6hgdzckfdgxgzhe.westus-01.azurewebsites.net\/?p=17293"},"modified":"2015-08-17T14:55:23","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T21:55:23","slug":"health-care-expert-suggests-step-by-step-approach-to-health-care-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/health-care-expert-suggests-step-by-step-approach-to-health-care-reform\/","title":{"rendered":"Health-care expert suggests step-by-step approach to health-care reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

The prescription for curing the nation\u2019s ailing health-care system is to take reform one step at a time, says a health policy expert at Northern Arizona University.<\/p>\n

Paul Dutton<\/strong>\u00a0believes successful reforms will take years to implement, \u201cbut the politics of the matter aren\u2019t permitting a parsing of reforms into sequential steps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dutton is a professor of history and executive director of the university\u2019s Interdisciplinary Health Policy Institute. He is working to educate the public about health-care issues so informed decisions, and progress, can be made. \u201cI believe that U.S. competitiveness in world markets and our standard of living will suffer irreparably if we don\u2019t meet the health-care challenge, and quickly,\u201d Dutton says. \u201cWe can\u2019t afford another 15 years of dithering.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Paul<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Author of\u00a0Differential Diagnoses, A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France<\/em>, Dutton\u2019s knowledge about health-care issues is being sought worldwide. He\u2019s a regular on the radio talk-show circuit, gave the commencement address at Brenau University in Georgia last spring, and is the keynote speaker for the European Studies conference at Duke University in November.<\/p>\n

He says the Germans and French are coming out of the recession faster than the United States in part because their taxpayers and employers spend only two-thirds as much as America on health care.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeanwhile, we have a system in which between 25 and 45 percent of workers are \u2018job locked\u2019 for reasons related to health insurance. A very large proportion of the U.S. workforce will not leave current employment because the worker, or his or her dependant, has a pre-existing medical condition, and is fearful that the condition would be excluded from coverage under a new plan,\u201d Dutton notes.<\/p>\n

\u201cA would-be Bill Gates might at this very moment be saying to herself, \u2018I can\u2019t afford the risk of starting my own company. I\u2019ve got a kid with diabetes\u2019. I wonder how many more Microsofts this country would have had by now\u2014all the jobs, wealth creation, spin-off industries and innovation if it weren\u2019t for this crazy health-care system we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dutton suggests in order to be successful, U.S. health care must address coverage, cost and quality, but the fact that they are interconnected make the politics of reform extremely complex.<\/p>\n

Dutton\u2019s\u00a0recent book<\/a>\u00a0points out what is working right with health care in France.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The prescription for curing the nation\u2019s ailing health-care system is to take reform one step at a time, says a health policy expert at Northern Arizona University. Paul Dutton\u00a0believes successful reforms will take years to implement, \u201cbut the politics of the matter aren\u2019t permitting a parsing of reforms into sequential steps.\u201d Dutton is a professor…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":17294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-staff"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}