Thursday, September 10, 2009

An Iterative Approach to Health Care Reform

I have to write this in my blog, because if I talk about it with my liberal friends I'm sure they'll start hating me again....

I have been in the IT world for a few years now, and the one thing I have seen over and over again is that the big bang large release of software just doesn't work very well. If you take 2 years to develop an application, by the time you are done, the problem the application was supposed to solve has completely changed and your solution is useless.

I am thinking that health care reform is going to end up much the same way. Congress/Obama is biting more than they can chew. They are trying to drop in this huge reform bill that will change everything without really knowing how any piece of it will affect the system as a whole.

We need to treat health care like an Agile project. In Agile methodology there is this idea of sprints where basically the whole team picks one issue to address and they all drive towards the goal of fixing that one issue. Once that issue is fixed, you move to the next issue and so on. This methodology leads to getting more useful solutions to the customer in less time.

I think we should use this methodology to fix health care. First, get a set of metrics that actually make sense. For example average insurance costs, number of uninsured people, level of care, etc. Then, implement one small (non-trillion dollar) improvement. Measure again, and repeat. It would be great, we would know what was helping and what was not and we would be able to provide solutions more quickly.

5 comments:

Crucis said...

Mrs. Ahab, welcome to the blogging world.

I'm a telecom engineer. Being in IT, you've obviously heard the term, "scope creep." That is what government is all about---scope creep. A moving target never reached and unreachable.

MCSA56 said...

But, is it really fundamentally the role of gov't to even attempt such a thing?

Ms. Ahab said...

Probably not, but I think it's going to happen so we might as well have it not suck so much.

Dedicated_Dad said...

I too am in IT. It ain't just "scope creep" - it's become an utter lack of scope, period.

We have this little document called "The Constitution" which defines the duties of various folks.

The Federal Government has certain "enumerated powers" (Article 1 Section 8) and the 10th Amendment says - rather plainly - that if something isn't in that list, then the Federal Government can't do it.

Yes, most of what they do isn't on the list, but is that an excuse for not even doing a head-fake in the general direction?

At this point I have no doubt they intend to "Rahm" it on through. I hope they do. I hope they make an utter and complete mess of the whole thing. I - frankly - hope they continue to ignore and anger We The People until we exercise our G*d-given right to abolish this sickness and start over.

Yes, it will be ugly - for a while - but nothing in the long run compared to what will happen if we don't.

God help us...

DD

Mike W. said...

DD - Unfortunately the Feds haven't been constrained to only the "enumerated powers" in decades.

I also think that so many of our fellow American's have been infected with the "sickness" that we could not (and would not) abolish it and start over.

More and more, most folks just want the government to babysit them, and as long as nanny government provides them with bread & circuses they'll happily allow their individual rights to be trampled upon.

Of course I'm a cynic.....