Day 1 -- morning

Whenever new arrivals step off the elevator to the 3rd floor they have a dazed look in their eyes: the surreal magnificence of the American Visionary Art Museum—just the taste that you get from the outside of the buildings: giant birdnest balcony, 6-foot mirror-mosaic egg—puts people into a state of beauty shock. The founder and director of the museum, Rebecca Hoffberger, gave a heart-breakingly eloquent welcome, asking us to "blow on the embers of all that is good."

For the keynote, Susan Parenti and Patch Adams created a kind of interwoven duo lecture, introducing each other and outlining some starting points for the intensive, some historical and philosophical perspective, and illustrating some design concepts for us all to engage with right away in this working conference.

Along the way Patch read from actual letters he has recently received from people who have turned to him with problems that the entire US health care aparatus has devastated. Any one of these letters by itself would be sufficient sign that this health care system itself is not just sick but in dire need of an emergency room.

From my notes:

health care: the time when we need to receive care and the time when we need to give care
covered vs coveraged

List of presidents since Wilson who have tried to increase universal coverage: as a sign of how long there has been popular pressure to offer health care as a right.
We are calling on the public: the politics of all, politics of everybody (like the fire dept)
Newer field of population health -- research that shows that greater income disparity in a country means people sicker across the income spectrum.
pathway 2: the opposite of that: market--
single payer activists

we have market collapse, but no collapse of the ideology
challenge the ideology of (corporate) markets, which are unreliable in 5 ways
1 pricing in health care, education, environment
2 indefensbile income distribution
3 bubbles & panics
4 unchecked markets encourage predatory policy
5 puts on the auction block things that shouldn't be (!)

Quote from composer Herbert Brün: "Every system will solve the problems that assail it and perpetuate the problems that maintain it."
 

Three starting points:
We favor health care for all, oppose relying on markets, and ask ourselves -- what is the health care system that i desire? want -- not settle for

design: to want, then protect that in a system
 

...

From letter number 4 "... doctors don't listen to me ... it's hard to believe that money is more important than life."
—Mark Enslin