Lawmakers Should See the ‘Big Picture’ of Medical Advances, USA Today Op-Ed Says

Health care issues that could "shape our lives in profound ways" have moved "from nowhere to center stage" in the current political debate, but "no one seems to be talking about the big picture," Norman Ornstein, an American Enterprise Institute senior resident and member of USA Today's board of contributors, writes in a USA Today opinion piece. As it stands now, politicians are focusing on the "biggest overt political battles": patients' rights, a Medicare prescription drug benefit and the Medicare trust fund, Ornstein writes. But he suggests that some "[b]reathtaking advances" -- developments from stem cell research, the human genome and the artificial heart -- that are "largely outside the Washington policy net" could "create huge ethical, moral and political dilemmas along the way." Ornstein notes that such advances present "huge implications" that policy makers have not yet considered, such as how to deliver them, pay for them and make them available. Ornstein asks, "Will we shape our future, making sure that we can make this transition to the new world of medicine and health care -- or let developments shape us?" He asks if society will link telecommunications, physics, chemistry, genetics and medicine to Medicare, Medicaid and health delivery or if it will "scramble" to make old systems adapt to new medical advances. He concludes, "If we are to avoid making a series of 20th-century responses to 21st-century problems, we need to force a larger debate than prescription drugs or federal support for stem cell research -- one on how we can shape our world to fit the exciting future of medicine, rather than the other way around" (Ornstein, USA Today, 7/25).