David Blumenthal on the Lessons History Holds for Health Reform
<p>In his latest <a href="/blog/2014/reflecting-health-reform-holiday-reading-and-affordable-care-act">Reflecting on Health Reform blog post,</a> Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal, M.D., offers a perspective on the Affordable Care Act that you haven't read before.</p><p>Other historic undertakings, including the Allied landing in Europe in June 1944, were also rife with complications and errors, says Blumenthal. "Quite simply, if we had subjected D-Day to 21st century levels of scrutiny and accountability, its 'rollout' might have had uncomfortable parallels to the ACA's," he says, providing a sampling of the things that went terribly wrong in the first hours, days, and weeks of the Normandy invasion. </p>
<p>"When scrutinized in real time, complex human endeavors are mosaics of success and failure whose outcomes are difficult to predict from early returns, and whose ultimate success depends on the ingenuity and will of leaders and their far-flung staffs," he says. Read the full post on <a href="/blog/2014/reflecting-health-reform-holiday-reading-and-affordable-care-act">The Commonwealth Fund Blog.</a></p>