Source: Journalnow.com
By PAUL GARBER

Start with a blank piece of paper and a pencil.

Now think of the kind of health-care system you’d like to have. Design it from scratch assuming you don’t know what kind of family you’d be born into — rich or poor, black or white, rural or urban.

What would it look like? Probably nothing like the system we currently have, said Diane Meier, an internationally known expert on palliative care.

Meier said the health-care system in the United States is broken and needs to be fixed from the bottom up. She urged people to work together and raise their voices to demand change.

“The public is very powerful, and it’s a sleeping giant,” she said. “Create a movement that would create change.”

Meier said from what she’s heard from her patients and during her travels, people want a health-care system in which doctors have more time to spend with their patients, in which they will listen better to their patients’ concerns, and if they get sick will come to their homes rather than having them shuttle between hospitals and doctors offices.

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