By Evan Falchuk

The New York Times has been running a series on its Economix blog about health care reform.

Today, they post answers to following the questson from three health care experts:  “What should our priorities for health care reform be?”

You should read them all, but you should think about two things.

First, Don Berwick’s response was most interesting.  As the head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Berwick is one of the most respected advocates for patient safety and health care quality.  Like me, he worries that focusing on money over medicine misses the bigger point:

To get the care we need and want for everyone, without courting national bankruptcy, “reform” had better mean “changing care,” not just “covering care.  So far, it doesn’t.

Oh, all the speeches have the phrase “delivery system reform” embedded somewhere in the list of components of health care reform.  But that frankly looks to me like listing, “Use an airplane,” somewhere on a list of components of flying.  It’s not an afterthought; it’s the core.  Attending to the difficult task of actually rebuilding our broken health care delivery system ought not to be one among many tactics of change; it ought to be the central point – the single most important aim of changing health care policy.

Berwick concludes that we don’t have a “shared vision of the health care system we want and need.”  He’s right, and it’s a point I’ve been trying to make, too.

And this is the second thing you should think about in reading these excellent responses.

Why, only five weeks from the President’s August 1 deadline for reform, are we just starting to have a conversation on what our priorities for health care reform ought to be?