Nancy Pelosi and the House of Representatives have allotted all of four hours to debating their massive, and stupendously complex, health care bill.  After just four hours of serious deliberation, they will vote on the biggest overhaul of American medicine in 40 years.  But as a doctor who takes care of sick and complex patients, I know that it can take me about that long to care for just one person. 

I’m an intensive care unit physician, and have worked in surgical intensive care units for more than ten years.  I’m board-certified in my specialty, and I spent many years training to become an ICU doctor - four years of medical school, one year of internship, three years of residency, and another year of specialty fellowship training – nine years in all.  Each patient I care for is generally quite sick, with multiple complex medical afflictions, most of which are life-threatening. 

When a new patient is admitted to the intensive care unit, I’ll often spend 3-4 hours solely with that patient.  I need that amount of time to perform any procedures that are immediately needed to stabilize the patient, to keep death at bay.  I also need that time to learn about the patient’s medical and surgical history, to decide on tests required to make diagnoses, and then to devise a treatment plan to make that patient better.  All of those really important activities can take multiple hours, but they’re well worth it.   

Right now, Congress believes that our health care system is on life support.  House Democrats believe that in order to fix this really, really complex problem, we need a 2,000 page piece of legislation.  However, this problem is so important and so complex, that it warrants almost no thought or debate at all.  Indeed, the four critical hours allotted to debate the health care bill in the House are about what I spend on a single patient. 

Apparently, our representatives in Congress believe that when you’ve got a really, really hard, important and complex problem on your hands, the best way to approach it is not to think about it very much.  Many, including our President, have said that the time for debating is over.  The “don’t think about it, just do it” approach to legislating health care in America is pretty staggering.  As a doctor, I know that the more complex and sick a patient is, the more time I need to spend to make sure that I do a good job.  I wonder how these congressmen would feel if their doctors took the Congressional approach to medicine – “This patient is too complex, let’s not think about it”?

Dr. Laura Niklason is a physician and professor of Anesthesia and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University.