Wisconsin Hospice Rights

(Fish) Food For Thought -- Deadliest Catch, Hospitals, and the Tragedy of the ...

What we have on our hands is an industry poised on the brink of collapse. Costs are spiraling out of control, government is frantically waving its hands trying to find a solution to an impending doom that many players in the industry still refuse to acknowledge as real. Competition has triggered an arms race gobbling up all the available resources, generating massive short term profits while eviscerating the long term stability of the industry. Reformers grasp for a foothold while everyone else seems to be keeping their foot on the accelerator, and the experts tell us it’s only a matter of time. In fact, it will happen in 2048… the earth will run out of fish.

You thought I was talking about health care, didn’t you?  I’m talking about the collapse of the world’s commercial fisheries, but I could have been talking about health care. In 2006, a Canadian scientist named Boris Worm released a paper predicting the collapse of all global commercial fisheries by the midway point of the century.

If you think medicine has nothing in common with fisheries, think about this. The Health care sector just had its own doomsday clock reset. Last week, the annual Medicare trustees report predicted the Medicare hospital insurance fund will be exhausted by 2024.

That’s not very far away.

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We talk all the time about how health care has ignored the lessons of other modernized industries. Usually we’re talking about learning from Toyota plants, or Netflix warehouses, or the airline industry.  There are many things to be learned from those examples.

But today I want to talk about what we can learn from a very different industry. The fishing industry.

But I also want to talk about the power of idealism, and the power of cooperation. There will be many paths towards a better health care system, a system that is actually patient centered, that is fair.

That gives patients the care they need, and no more – and the care they want, and no less.

I want to start with the story of how the fishing industry is saving itself and how that example opens one of the many paths towards health care salvation.

Does anybody watch the “Deadliest Catch?” It goes basically like this. It’s very cold.  Being a native of the other great non-contiguous state of Hawaii, I like to watch cold activities on TV more than participate in them. “The Deadliest Catch” is one long, frigid thunderstorm during which crazy Alaskans engage in a frantic race to catch as much king crab as possible in the few short days of the season.