The difficulties and complexities of change

As I was thinking about this reflection, I realized many of the topics that came to mind for me were controversial ones where a "good outcome" is extremely subjective. A couple of these were abortion rights and gun control. A big reason for any of the failed outcomes we would come up with is subjectivity. In hand washing, we discussed that doctors may think it is better to have the time to care for 100 patients a day without washing their hands than to care for 70 patients a day while washing their hands well. Others argue that it is better to cure only 70 patients than giving the a disease to others.

In the United States, we promote diversity and equality for all. Forty years after Martin Luther King Jr. died, we still have more African Americans in poverty than any other race. We still have African Americans in the "ghetto" or slumps of cities. Despite serious efforts, we still have not achieved "equality" for all. Although laws exist against discrimination based on race, people still have prejudices against or for someone based on color. So what have we done to promote equality? Affirmative action is a policy enacted to promote equal opportunity and increase diversity. However, there has been much controversy over the policy because the policy in itself brings special attention to those in the minority. It seems to give the minority "special treatment". An area where affirmative action is very popular is education.

Having affirmative action in place often causes students to think less of the achievements of minorities who have gotten into prestigious colleges. Affirmative action brings more attention to these minorities, when, isn't the point to have them "blend in" because we are all the same? In the case of promoting equality, lots of time, effort, and even regulation have been put in place, but the desired outcome has not yet been achieved. Is regulation a good thing? Or does it just cause policy resistance?

In a current day example, mass amounts of time and effort have gone to fixing the American Health Care System. A huge market failure that is related to this system is the free rider problem where a portion of the population is having their health care expenses paid for by everyone else. There are so many sides and policy resistances intermixed in the debate to fix the health care system, will this be a failed effort? With nationalized health care, would everyone continue to get unnecessary procedures causing an inefficient use of resources and even more money to be spent?

Our efforts to solve problems lead to policy resistance, where things get worse before they get better (ie: the economic recession). The other day I was reading about Romanian birth rates in the 1960s. In an effort to raise birth rates, tax incentives, contraceptive and abortion outlaws, and propaganda campaigns were introduced. Although birth rates grew early on, deaths nearly tripled because women began to do unsanitary abortions, children were given away to orphans, and disease rates grew.

Do we think this applies to hand washing as well? I think that there is a possibility it does. In class we discussed that a reason hand washing efforts may have failed is because doctors don’t see any “tangible” effects. If those "better” chemically-made antibiotics that kill more germs were not invented, would more diseases get transferred on, causing doctors to personally realize that they were transferring the diseases? Would more people die, leading to a bigger commitment to hand washing?