We need health care that's not bipartisan, but nonpartisan

I have spent the last six months navigating the consumer health insurance market and watching the national health care debate. With national health care reform I believe that we have an unprecedented opportunity to change our nation for the better, but I also share in the national frustration with what has taken place so far.

Shaping up America's health care delivery system is a daunting task on its own. Center the effort not on the raw facts and unflinching logic of science but instead on the sound-bite driven dogma and transparent self-interest of American politics, and it's little wonder our nation's efforts seem to be foundering.

When it comes to something as important as the health and safety of America's citizens, the ulterior motives of any political party should have no bearing on policy and no seat at the negotiating table. Elected officials should recognize this and conduct themselves accordingly.

If our leaders cannot manage to have a fact-based discussion about the objective risks and benefits of health care reform, then they should do the responsible thing and delegate the job to someone who can.

America's leaders are losing our trust. And when it comes to making decisions about health and medicine, the requirement of trust is non-negotiable.

People in my profession respect this and go to great lengths to win our patients' trust. When health care reform was presented as a clear national imperative by President Obama, many people trusted his word. When legislation fell into gridlock on unflinchingly partisan lines, their trust started to waiver. When the name-calling started, their trust grew thinner. And when the media pinned America's hopes and fears about health reform on the election of a former nude model as a senator from Massachusetts, many of us lost hope entirely.

Americans have a visceral understanding that sound medical judgment shouldn't waiver with the political super-majority. And they are correct.

In clinical medicine, a physician's best practices remain the same regardless of his or her political persuasion. I suspect that the same is true on a national scale. The urgency to reform health care for the average person hasn't changed; our trust in the reformers has.

There is still a clear path to effective health care reform. But to get there, we are going to have to kick partisanship into the back seat.

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Will Nicholson, M.D., practices family medicine in Maplewood.

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