This blog will lead the reader to a concept that is both old and new as the problems of society. Although it is written for the general public, I decided that it is best to introduce it to our ‘global village.’ I start the concept that I call ‘Self-Management’ in the area of health insurance, although you may feel that it is dealing with other areas that concern us: how to save for a home, how to get a job, how to improve our future, and many other pressing concerns in are our society. You may find it somehow familiar that for some strange reason society managed to get itself into a complicated and self-destructive mess. I will then take you this whirlpool that is swirling in our minds, to see how this applies to health insurance and medical services in America and the rest of the world. We are not only spectators to these problems, but also actors in a “tragedy,” to which we can then propose solutions. These solutions will smooth the deformations in the whirlpool, badly needed in a system comprising large masses, as is health insurance. Today, by the latter half of 2009, we are in the midst of witnessing the slow collapse of all health insurance systems that have been in practice for well over the 90 years. The recently tested HMOs have created new expectations that have brought even greater disappointments. The burden of laws, regulations and government agencies in health services has relegated citizens to a kind of robot, programmed to follow the system’s directions. As a consequence, ‘big brother’ tradition in health insurance is suppressing our creativity and personal initiatives in many other ways of our day-by-day activities. We are left with very little breathing room for creativity and inventiveness, leaving our elective representatives and best brains with few choices on the best course to follow.
Of course, I do not want to include all industry in the above generalization. I am mainly thinking of the administrative fields such as health insurance. We must expand our imagination to organize other areas of our everyday lives. Under the principle ‘top down’ management in health insurance, the human mind, the highest personal faculty we possess and praise ourselves, is repressed by artificial economic pressures, in a huge and powerful environment that doesn’t allow us to develop much individuality. In our present crooked society, the rules by which man must follow are already set, usually the product of small-minded people. These rules are immediately protected by material ‘for profit’ interests, with very little or no margin for altruism and the ‘general good’ of the public, meaning ourselves. Profit brings power, and power represses even more, removing from the individual any possibility of expression. In our modern society, people feel the sensation of being repressed, becoming smaller with time. If you are born poor, the odds are that your children with inherit your ‘disease,’ with few exceptions. If you lack a home, you will most probably pass that on to your kids. If you are disadvantaged, you are most probably doomed to stay like that most of your life.
Almost all governments are very little from the people, less than that by the people, and even less for the people. The ‘self management revolution’ that I am planning will not be unleashed by protests. That won’t help. We must change our minds to do the right thing, something intelligent and practical. My blog will go through chapters that explain the background of our predicament. Its intention is to convince the readers that a different system is feasible. It could be easily followed and applied, not just to health insurance, but also other systems with large masses where personal economics is at stake. I think that the best model learn Self-Management is health insurance, so this book will go extensively into ‘Self-Managed Health Insurance’ (SMHI). We may find ourselves, even inside our SMHI, squandering ‘federal benefits’ that the Federal bureaucracy has dumped on us. We may try to get whatever ‘they’ are willing to give, but may be too difficult to bear the strings attached and comply with. We may try to go our own way without their ‘help'.