#wicked problems

For any - ANY - complex policies, there are going to be a significant amount of competing interests and many of them will be valid. That’s not to say that the ultimate goal you might want isn’t an honorable or good one, but simply that it is very likely not nearly as simple as you think unless you are a real expert in that space - in which case, you know it’s not simple.

Healthcare is a really good example of this. Free healthcare for everyone sounds great, but there are multiple issues that need to be solved for. In the policy space, these are sometimes referred to as wicked problems. The biggest one is we can’t force people to be medical professionals, there have to be incentives. Coming from a family of doctors, I can tell you the daily stress, the intense time commitments, the legal liabilities, and the fact that you are frequently dealing with scared, angry people who don’t understand medicine is more practice than certainty, are all really difficult to live with. Doctors in private practice are never off, they are always having to think about their patients. My dad once had to go leave on Thanksgiving while in the middle of cutting a turkey to see a patient. They miss kids recitals and important events, they get called in the middle of the night.

So how do you get people to enter and then stay in this field? Especially when your smartest candidates - the very ones you want to be doctors - could do just as well, if not substantially better, in other higher paying fields like finance? Most doctors are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from student loans, so you have to fix the student loan system. It takes ten years minimum of schooling and residency to become a doctor, making little money. So that needs to be worked out. Once you are a doctor, you need to spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on malpractice insurance. So there’s the legal system, which has its own complex problems. Then you have how most people are paying with insurance, and doctors don’t get to set the prices for those services, so there’s another entire industry you have to fix. And each of those industries has its own balancing factors (before insurance companies would pay for your claims, if you didn’t have the money on hand to pay potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in emergency medical fees, you’d just die - insurance literally IS the better system to not having it).

Unaffordable healthcare is a major problem, but I’d like to focus on unaffordable prescription medication specifically for this wicked problem. It’s not right that medicine isn’t easily available or affordable to a lot of people in our country. People who have mental illness need medication, that’s not something that just balances out without treatment (and all categories of illness as well). I feel very strongly about this matter because it affects a lot of people that I know and care about, so I can only image how many people struggle with this every day. I even have a hard time being able to afford medications and I’m always very upfront with doctors about having them write generic prescriptions for me so that I at least have a chance at being able to afford it!

These are my notes on scientific ideas through time about prejudice, focusing on racism in America. I designed the notes like this so I would have mental associations with each time period and it really helped! Please pay no mind to the level of artistic talent :)

Until I Write Again,