Posted on 12/27/2019 7:01:16 AM PST by Kaslin
As U.S. healthcare slides toward collapse, Americans are looking in the wrong direction for a cure. They are trying to cut costs and save money in order to make healthcare affordable. No one is focusing what really matters: dollar efficiency.
To avoid miscommunication, terms should be clearly defined. Healthcare, one word, refers to a complex system that cost Americans $3.65 trillion in 2018 (19.4 percent of U.S. GDP). That amount is 130 percent of Great Britain’s GDP.
Health care as two words includes the services or work product of health professionals as well as the goods and devices involved in diagnosis and treatment. Health care is a legally protected fiduciary relationship between a patient and a care provider.
Cost in healthcare is often expressed in confusing, incomplete, and inaccurate ways. When I asked a hospital CFO how much it cost to do a cardiac catherization, he accessed his computer and told me a number in thousands of dollars. When I asked how he knew this, he answered, “Simple. We divided the number of catheterizations you did by the budget allocation for the catherization lab.” There was no aggregation of costs such as labor hours, disposables, durable goods and devices, amortization schedules, and overhead.
True or accounting cost is the sum of all sellers’ expenditures necessary to bring products or services to market. Costs in healthcare are not accounted that way. They are allocated or calculated. Out-of-pocket cost is the consumer’s personal expenditure.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The article gave me an idea.
Medical care providers must provide a schedule of costs for the things they do.
We have insurance like we do now. The insurance company now provides us with a list of preferred providers.
We enhance that mechanism for choosing providers.
Providers will have to constantly display their prices for their various procedures.
If we choose a lower-priced provider, the insurance company will give us a benefit by lowering the next year’s premium or paying more the cost of the procedures we undergo.
This a way of getting competition into healthcare.
Uh, no -- it's not.
If it's truly a "legally protected fiduciary relationship" between a patient and a care provider, then why is a third party paying the bills?
The author had a glorious opportunity to explain the root of the problem, and missed it entirely.
There’s no way to reform the present system of government spending, its too large and too many people are tied to it.
The only way to provide competitive choice is to allow a second “free-market” option to develop. Create medical “free trade” zones where all payments are done in cash directly - no 3rd party payers unless that is agreed upon by doctor and patient. all costs are published or negotiated. Make the income tax free for the doctors there.
Even if the purchasing power of the dollar was better, the overinflated 1000% mark up or more is still there.
“no 3rd party payers unless that is agreed upon by doctor and patient”
But we can’t afford to be without medical insurance because of the high costs even if they were “reasonable”. Just like insuring our house against major damage.
The scheme doesn’t require government intervention of any sort. It doesn’t require people to have insurance.
Perhaps you’re thinking that employers shouldn’t provide health insurance. Clark Howard the consumer affairs talk show host (is he still on?) said that was the major cause of our healthcare cost problem.
Up until 1986, the annual Medicare cost report led to a promise of the same amount next year +7% or so.
Thus, the principal job of a CFO was to allocate costs (”cost” being all expenditures in last FY) to things most likely to grow and away from “money losing” service lines.
Once Medicare introduced fixed payments, the game changed to whipping volume by shortening duration of hospitalization. If you are going to get $15 000 to treat a pneumonia, and you can send them out in two days instead of five, you keep the difference to spend on administrators and waterfalls in the lobby.
Medicare, as a prototype of a government program, has never really caught up with this. Yes, they have been penalizing readmissions within 30 days, but only for the same diagnosis. There are computer programs that make it trivial to make admission #1 “pneumonia”, admission #2 “heart failure”, admission #3 “reaction to drug”, and so on.
As a result, the hospital sector with their partners the “private” insurance industry and Big Pharma have evolved an elaborate system to strip mine the employers and the government who pay for “health care”.
Of course, it was necessary to break the doctors first, but this job is basically done.
bmp
Since employers pay employee healthcare,
the company employer should pay our auto & home insurance too.
Companies shoild pay our mortgage and utilities too.
This article is complete and utter nonsense
the healthcare industry as it is continues to suck up more and more billions of dollars into its orbit
I live in the bay area and just in the last three or four years I’ve seen not one but at least six giant new Kaiser Permanente and otter hospitals buildings built or renovated
Now I’m going to say very clearly here that you are responsible for your own health ! you should not rely on the medical establishment for anything !
unless it’s very severe. Pain. Injury. Etc
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