Despite the political common ground taking hold for healthcare reform, one thing the Affordable Care Act has done is to push change forward. Regardless of partisan agendas, healthcare delivery, rather the systems we employ to receive healthcare in America are expanding in concentric circles from newly created online healthcare consumers.

The business of healthcare is evolving. Moreover, the way we pay for healthcare is now directed towards prevention and keeping us out of the most sacred of all structures in American healthcare, the hospital. Known to financial managers and investment houses as Medicare Part A. This once seemingly endless source of revenue is now being penalized for readmissions and for failing to treat patients with “respect and dignity.”

Scholars and healthcare visionaries label this phenomenon as pursuit of the Triple Aim for healthcare. Espoused by Dr. Donald Berwick and colleagues, this seemingly simplistic title has now amassed data proving that if communities, states, and even a nation that makes healthcare accessible to it population, can achieve The Triple Aim. That is, a defined population cannot address its healthcare industry woes, be they economic, quality of care, or lack of access independently. They must be engaged concurrently. Specifically, if the quality of care is truly elevated and the health of the entire population improves, the costs will come down. It has now been proven.

Yet, Paul Ryan, Hillary Clinton, and all other presidential wannabes discuss only the economic plight of our bloated and redundant system. Mrs. Clinton who took this singular approach in the ’90s only to be intellectually flogged by all, one would think, should have learned that this myopic strategy will fail. Paul Ryan, by recommending the privatization of Medicare, citing cost overruns as his thesis, too, should expand his readings beyond political polling.

Berwick, who published his vision and postulate for healthcare is based on society need. Imagine that. The late Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan also urged Mrs. Clinton to look beyond income statements and balance sheets and find a societal mandate for healthcare in her first bout with this challenge. The Republicans, obsessed with balancing the budget see no explanation for reform other than to bring solvency to the financial equations of the business of healthcare.

Yet, today in America, we inch closer to semantic interoperability in electronic health records, universal access with the expansion of Medicaid, albeit in limited states. And we are slowly, at a glacial pace, recognizing we are a nation that is sedentary, overweight, and as a result, succumb to one after another chronic and degenerative diseases. All of which, can be prevented simply by better diet and exercise.

Politically, we are awash in what the poet T.S. Eliot called the “Wasteland.” Intellectually, we are what Samuel Beckett portrayed in his writings as “Waiting for Godot” for we as a society to act. But, I see progress. Admittedly, incremental. But, hope is something I refuse to discard.