Wild Summer / Health Care pain

It's been a wild summer. My students and I have been working on a robot project. We're trying to get six robots to communicate with each other as they search through a building to find a target. Since the robots are relatively dumb and have few sensors, this is a real challenge. The more I work on robots, the more I'm amazed by humans, dogs, cockroaches, ..in fact, anything alive.

We have spent countless hours at the city pool. Sara loves to swim anywhere we can find water. This was the summer of learning to dive, snorkel, surf on Dad's back, and wear a bikini. The latter I could have waited for. Sara will be six soon (Sept. 3), which hardly seems possible. Her mind is an astoundingly complex labyrinth, and fathoming it is becoming more and more of a challenge. Fortunately, it is quite beautiful for the most part, and seems to have very little of deviousness and purposeful rebellion.

So - now we can get down to brass tacks. Something is horribly wrong with our medical care system. I've watched and listened as my Mother has had to fight her way through a completely debilitating morass of paper, people, and institutionalized ignorance to get help for her comparatively minor medical problems. The frustration has occassionally moved her to tears. My sister has taken significant time from work (thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act) to help, but it's daunting nevertheless.

I've had my own such experiences, and from them I've learned that you absolutely must take complete charge of your own medical care. You simply cannot expect the system to provide any continuity of information. Minutes before I was sedated for my recent colonoscopy, I spoke with the doctor to remind him of exactly why he had scheduled my procedure and what he was looking for. He told me he appreciated that, since he didn't have a record of our conversation from six weeks prior, and he was trying to remember why he was doing this! Is this incompetence? Not by today's standards - it's normal now.

This nation's health care information infrastructure is in shambles, just as the transportation system is in shambles. This is largely due to population growth, but both problems are fairly easy to solve from a technical point of view. Public attitudes, especially from suspicious liberals, are the great hindrance. There is such an outcry about privacy violation and big-brother-ism every time systemic fixes, such as a national medical database and automated highway systems (the road drives your car in metro areas), are brought up. I think we are just going to have to swallow some of those bitter pills lest we choke on the alternatives.