Has society made Americans crazy or have crazy Americans built this crazy society?
I am entertaining writing a new novel beyond the three volume Catching Cold Series. In this new book, initially titled Three Swords, The Jon DeLeon Series, some, of my tough minded characters go after health practitioner education, health insurance, and healthcare resources. I would like devoted, committed, characters make changes to the healthcare system. The thesis of this book is that the healthcare system is entrenched, building in self-corrective but now ossified mechanisms that no longer respond to current needs in the United States.
Why a novel
So, why write a novel about this at all? There are already tomes, think tank documents. position papers, and innumerable PowerPoint presentations on these topics. One observation is that this trove of material is not written for ordinary people with urgent healthcare needs. And these papers and discussions don’t make the needle move because they are written for a small audience with tremendous positional inertia. A sitting elephant unwilling to move.
Perhaps we need to think of the first quarter of the 21st century as a transition. Where we move from a healthcare system that perhaps made sense in the mid-20th century, but is producing chaos, decay and destruction in the early 21st
And many people of the people who need change are the least able to understand it. A single mom can’t spend time studying a weighty healthcare document if she’s working two jobs. Maybe she is uneducated. But that has little to do with her intelligence. She needs to be provided with a vehicle through which she can understand the health care system that starts at her level. A tool that reaches her, letting her absorb the material based on her own understanding can help her understand how a system to which she pays from which she receives little that she understands can be replaced. A carefully written novel can deliver this message.
But the novel, of course, has to be informative and in addition provide a good, positive emotional experience for reader, opening them to the possibility that they can change a s system that makes little sense to them. Should they feel strong enough to want to replace the system. In Judgment, catastrophe through the release of a child-harming drug had to be inflicted on America for the country to react. The force of the people’s response overwhelmed all of the lobbying, all the position papers, all the political speeches and all of the institutional inertia of the pharmaceutical industry to recreate their regulation.
Three swords will need to do that, but do it differently. And I’d like to stay away from politics focusing instead on longstanding infrastructure. For example, if we are used to, and tired of the healthcare insurance wars e.g.., the Affordable Care Act (aka Obama Care). What should be the mission of healthcare insurance be? If we had to build up health insurance from scratch how would it look? Can we get there from here? What type of insurance network would not just require our endurance, but make us proud of, and why? And how would immigrants to this country be managed? How would adjudication of claims be handled? Should care ever be refused? Three Swords must address these.
In grappling with these, healthcare must also address the most crucial question. What is the role of government? What should happen when private capitalistic institutions fail to discharge responsibility? Maybe the question begs the answer. Why has private insurance failed? Because they are for profit and will not insure those who cannot pay escalating premiums? This also requires me to take on the capitalist/socialist argument. Some of this was developed in Judgment as. Olivia’s young crew debated whether access to the best drugs was a right in an obligation,. Three Swords is going to have plumb these depths.
In addition, how about the sick, the uninsured, the criminals rushed to the hospital with knife and gunshot wounds. Should their care be different?. Who should pay for the expansion of mental services should society respond by transforming itself to a less violent, less mental instability provoking environment. How does one deal with violence in America? Add Xanax to all drinking and bottled water? Has society made Americans crazy or have crazy Americans built a crazy society? And what changes do we make to both preserve our physical health, mental health and freedom?
How can we assure that healthcare providers are appropriately compensated for their training knowledge, education, experience and expertise. And if the money doesn’t go principally to administrators, how can we continue to encourage the very best and well-motivated among us to go to medical and nursing schools. To become physician assistants. Lab specialists, imaging technologists. regardless of their financial background? Knowing that they can practice and both enjoy life. Rewarded by interactions with patients. And not overly complicated by financial considerations.
As if that weren’t enough, we’ll have to address healthcare professional education. Also must all medical schools engage in medical research? This was a subtheme in my first novel, Saving Grace, where faculty who joined the medical school as diagnosticians and theaters felt forced to write and conduct research protocols. One of the reasons for the change in emphasis has been money. As traditional sources of revenue have dried up, traditional teaching medical schools have forced teachers to write research grant. The result dysfunction and dissatisfaction. This must be taken on as well.
Well, one thing is certain. I will need more than Dr. Deleon, Olivia Stedman and Meredith Doucette to take on these enterprises., so it will be important for me to develop new characters around them. Building new characters is always time consuming and always fun. I will write about that next time. But I do have a character Dr. Marie Blackfox, from Saving Grace who herself had iconoclastic ideas as a medical student, was damaged by an administrative decision, and took the time for a slow, day-by-day recovery. Since Jon is not a physician, she will complement him well.
Also, this book will require a tremendous amount of research. Like many other educated people. I think I know things that I don’t really know. So I need to go back and make sure I understand what the current status of the system is involving education, insurance, insurance and healthcare resources. This will be complex and time consuming, but I will learn a ton. My initial sense is that I will spend through June learning the background, plus the research for this book and to develop characters. I then can begin writing the book in late summer. Should my health keep up. I will have this book available for publication by the end of the year. I’m tempted to say this is going to be my last novel, but I always say that. So we have to assume that it’s not. But I would like to apply everything I’ve learned about novel writing so far to this novel.
They only real way to change a system is to show that the current system can be made irrelevant. People educated or not, well entrenched don’t like to be considered irrelevant. But the offering of alternative systems that produce the loss of jobs of major administrators who are entrenched in the system is an important driver for change. The key is remember what Gen. George S. Patton said, “fixed fortifications are monuments to men’s stupidity.”
But Three Swords also has to be entertaining as well as informative. It can’t be a policy tome wolf in a novel’s sheep clothing. That’s the challenge.