Every day we hear about the need to revamp our health care.  There are bills in Congress, speeches on TV, discussions in every home.  We've all heard them and participated in some.  We may not agree on how this new health care system should look but we agree that the old one isn't working. What I find confusing is that the debate is about health care insurance rather than about health care itself.  Insurance companies don't provide health care.  They are in the business of making a profit.  The goal of any insurance is to sell more policies, have more participants, and pay out less than they take in.  It has nothing to do with what someone needs when they are sick or hurt.

Not everything can be measured on the scale of profit and loss.  Medicine and providing health care to our society is not about business but about people and helping those people. Our society has a service industry.  Hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners.  That is what we consider the business of service.  It is necessary to be innovative and to provide that service so the company can stay in business and thrive.

Medicine and health care are a service industry of a different kind.  If we don't serve ourselves with adequate, up-to-date medical technology what message are we giving ourselves.  It's not about insurance and it's not about business.  It's about healing, or medicine used to be about healing.  I wonder why we have become such a sick nation that it is necessary to have a medical facility on almost every corner (the new convenience mart or gas station).  Because it has become a very large and very profitable business to have a sick nation.  We can't afford to get well - our economy needs us to support the business of being sick.

I certainly don't have any answers, but I believe we need to ask the right questions before we can find those answers.  Ask yourself and the people who represent you to start looking for some right questions.  If we're going to have a debate about health care then let's discuss the real issue.  What happened to our healers?  Why won't we let them provide us with health care rather than have us belong to a health care provider insurance plan?  Where did the health care go in all this?