My book selection for February was something that I’d had a great interest in since the passing of “Obama’s Healthcare” package. There was so much debate & such strong feelings on both sides of the issue. Truth be told, I’m not really very happy about the final legislation as passed, but I do think it’s a good step in the right direction. It still needs a lot of work & our country has a long way to go before we have a comprehensive overhaul of both our healthcare and health insurance system. I’d added the book Who Killed Health Care?: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure to my PaperBackSwap.com wishlist well over a year ago & now seemed like a great time to dive into the complex subject. This is a very intense book & not light reading. I don’t have a chance of doing any justice to the summary of the book & it’s detailed contents, so I’ll just try to post a few things that I found interesting & give you some insight into the topics covered in the book.
The author identifies 5 killers of healthcare in America and offers a detailed chapter on how each one is contributing to the giant mess we currently face- the insurance companies, the general (mega) hospital, the employers, the US Congress and the academics. She advocates an ambitious makeover to our system that involves consumer-driven healthcare where individuals make their own decisions about which insurance to purchase or which doctors & specialized treatment centers have the best ratings & results to earn their business. It’s really fascinating & I like how there are many aspects that both liberals and conservatives can champion, especially returning our healthcare system to a much more free-market economy where the end user (the patient) is directly making the purchasing choices.
-Profit vs. Non-Profit Hospitals & Insurance Companies: how these companies are ending up with hundreds of millions in revenue and billions in the bank at the end of the year all by denying treatment & coverage to patients/clients, all the while getting some really sweet tax write-offs and making it difficult for entrepreneurial businesses to compete on a level playing field
-The paradox of medicine is that the better it makes you, the less you need it. The sicker you are, the more money you spend. There’s very little profit motive for doctors or hospitals to actually improve your condition or health, especially for the chronic conditions that plague such a large part of our population and take up an overwhelming slice of the healthcare dollars that are spent each year
-Evolution of Insurance: from employer provided PPO’s to HMO’s to managed care, how it’s for the ordinary & everyday expenses instead of in place to cover the catastrophic and chronic types of illnesses. Since health insurance is generally tied to employment, employees are tied to jobs that might not be their best fit & employers typically only offer a one-size-fits-all plan or policy to employees instead of letting them shop around & pick the type of plan (or multiple plans) that would suit their family needs the best
-Lack of information: In our current system, there is no way to measure which doctors achieve outstanding results for various illnesses or evaluate the satisfaction of patients. There are very few metrics by which we can evaluate healthcare outcomes or that the average consumer can have any idea what the best place to have a baby or get a heart bypass surgery. The government has an important role to play in providing transparency and accountability of providers and hospitals. She offered some good parallels on how various groups help consumers evaluate things like cars (Consumer’s Report and NHTSA star ratings), and how the SEC (securities and exchange commission) was set up to regulate the financial industry and provide standards on how companies were to report their fiscal results.
-Government Interference: everybody wants to argue that the private sector is better & business are more efficient at providing services, but the way regulations are passed that favor certain type of tax breaks to employers and when the government is involved in deciding minute details of how and what types of medical costs it will reimburse through medicare and medicaid, politicians are making worse choices than doctors and patients would make.
GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I totally missed it yesterday, but , Texas celebrated 175 years of independence from Mexico.
