Collecting ideas on health care...

You can’t be an expert on everything. There just isn’t enough time and energy. The best you can do is to pick a few areas to “specialize” in, and then rely on someone else’s knowledge on other matters. I call this latter approach the “pick an expert” strategy, because there are invariably experts on either side of an issue, and you just have to pick one, acting with at least some degree of faith, and hope for the best.

For me, education falls into the “specialize” category. I’m not an expert, but I am trying to read and learn as much as I can about it. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, discussing it, and, recently, even writing about it. Aside from education being valuable on its own merits, I figure that any progress we make in getting people to read, write, and think more is bound to carry over into other areas and help us solve some of our other problems.

Health care falls into the “other” category for me. It’s just not something I have a passion about. I haven’t put much time into understanding how it works. I don’t know what the problems are, let alone how we should go about solving them. I do recognize that this is an important issue, however, and that we are rapidly coming to a fork in the road as to how we structure our health care system.

And so I’ve started paying a bit more attention to health care. I’ve begun collecting ideas and opinions. Like a beachcomber collecting shells, I stop here and there and add something interesting to my satchel. I take my ideas home and lay them out. I organize them, reflect on them, then rearrange them. I found a few here today, and thought you might like to see them.

I’ll never be fully informed on this issue. But I’ll add to my collection of ideas and try to shape them into something resembling an informed opinion. Then at some point, I’ll take that opinion and use it to help me “pick an expert.” And hope for the best.