Previous Event

March 13, 2005
"Health Care in America – a Physician’s Perspective: Who cares, How, How much, and Why? OR the Moral Ecology of its Function and Dysfunction"
by Michael Stevens, M.D.

Dr. Stevens became interested in health care while serving as a medic in Viet Nam, and 10 years later, at age 32, entered Medical School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is a board-certified general and child and adolescent psychiatrist.  He has been a clinician, an administrator (formerly Medical Director of Valley Mental Health), and currently primarily does psychopharmacology research, although he continues to treat patients (outside of research protocols).   He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Utah Health Sciences Center, and completed his residency and fellowship there.  He is originally from Florida, and came to Utah in 1984 to do his residency in Psychiatry.

In a time of constant change, few things are changing faster than health care.  Medical science is advancing more rapidly than ever, and new technologies to treat illness seem to be outstripping our ability and/or willingness to pay for them.   What’s more, it confronts our society with "allocation of resource" choices that we have never faced before.   We have, again utilizing new technologies, made ourselves less healthy (sedentary, obese), and poisoned our environment, with good intentions, but bad health outcomes, causing an enormous burden of preventable illness.   We have no system of care.  We have "systems of care", public and private, quasi-public, and quasi-private, overlapping and with no unifying set of principles to guide them.   Being the "purest" capitalistic country in the world, we repeatedly experiment with “for-profit” solutions, despite the fact that, by rule, and/or by definition, neither corporations nor systems can care (as in health care).  Consequently, the resources allocated to health care are utilized far less efficiently than in most developed countries.  Many of our health-care structures are precariously close to collapse  - currently we are responding by throwing money at any structure that appears about to collapse.

The speaker will (foolishly but bravely) offer some thoughts on:  1. some questions we need to be asking, but are not; 2. some factors that we should be seriously considering , but are not; and 3. hypothesize about some barriers to  better health care that are not as obvious as the ones we see on the cover of newsmagazines.     

References and Resources:

Dr. Stevens will provide a handout at the presentation.