Health Care + P2P
Hey Lucas, kudos for getting the ball rolling on this track.
As you may have noticed one of my little obessions is food resilience, community food etc. Another is Health care . It is a big and important topic in Europe what with an ageing population and a general rise in costs. But it didn´t register on my radar until a friend in Berlin mentioned that he doesn´t have health insurance as the costs were too high ( something like 300 Euros/month) and that he is far from alone in this. It´s pretty scary because as a craftsperson he handles lots of dangerous equipment and at least one of his friends had had an accident recently while not being insured. As you can imagine the consequences were pretty awsul, both from a psychological but also finacial point of view.
While exploring the concept of commons and what work people are doing in this space the topic of healthcare popped up and it felects the provision of helathcare as percieved from the perspective of “recipient”: http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/protecting-and-enhancing-commons/mission_case/healthcare-all. I think the reflections in this post that you shared on twitter are a good overview of the discussion from a metalevel: http://healthafteroil.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/goodbye-to-bad-knowledge/. But there is no real conversation or discussion of solutions.
I grew up in a household with “Where there is no doctor” as the first point of refence for dealing with health issues courtesy if a geeky Dad from a rural community in the middle of nowhere in Sudan. And I am pretty convinced that we can do a lot of peer-2-peer innovation to free up resources for critical health care provision. But to be honest I would prefer alternatives where we are not put at the mercy of private interests. And so I would really like to explore feasible alternatives and different approaches that seem promising. Anyone know of relevant initatives, ongoing or past, we could learn from? They could be failures too, you can leqarn alot from exploring what went wrong 