Hot Potato

Have you ever played the game Hot Potato? (here is a short description)

The game can be so much fun. Except when it is not at a party and when you are the hot potato.

In the United States, the healthcare system in general feels like a giant game of hot potato. Except there are no winners (maybe the insurance companies?), there are way too many losers (doctors who heal by clicking with the computer mouse — more on it later in a different post) and the patients are the hot potatoes.

Nobody seems to have the answer and the solution, but everyone always have a list of names/facilities that you can contact next.

So on paper, you are never out of options.

You are always taken care of. Kind of…

There is always a specialist to go to next.

Somebody else is always on the horizon, to take it from there.

But who coordinates all this?

Who crosses off the potential causes from the list on the way to a comprehensive diagnosis?

Especially that you fill out tons of paperwork in the meantime to allow these different entities to pass around your medical records, but not everything, because privacy is taken very seriously.

It feels like it is taken seriously enough, to just make this already difficult process even more complicated.

At the end the hot potato is dropped and end up on the floor. In the dirt. And there is nobody around eager to pick it up. I mean, it is hot and dirty. Who would want that?

And the best part: nobody is responsible. Nobody’s fault and nobody did anything wrong, yet somehow the hot potato ended up in the dirt. Somebody ruined the game. But who?

To find that out, it would be already a different game. Clue