Curing the Healthcare Crisis

Today even in the hardest of times healthcare costs keep rising. The number of people able to afford good coverage is dropping all the time. Politicians claim to have the answer in more management or simply reducing the amounts paid for various services. The government makes the position it is the largest buyer of goods so it should set the price and the insurance companies simply follow their lead. You may hope this will work, but it is doomed from the start because it does not address the challenge that causes the cost increases. Medicine works and due to this more people live longer with more health problems that in turn cost more to treat.  Do you see any way this is going to change?  How can this model ever go down in cost?  At what point do you stop paying for healthcare?

In today’s healthcare the industry gets paid when your illness symptoms are improved or go away.  So the incentive is to keep you alive but not healthy.  If you achieve health you no longer depend upon them and no one gets paid not your physician not your therapist not the pharmacy or medical equipment manufacturer.  All of their income will go away.  If a pharmacy company discovered the ultimate medicine that would with one treatment treat all illnesses once and for all time do you believe your medical office or insurance group would prescribe it?  In a few weeks all of their patients would be gone and with it their income.  Do you believe anyone in the healthcare industry is looking for such a therapy?  If they found one who would prescribe it?

Providing more money may briefly bring greater services to the system but in the end you will simply have a higher bill which eventually no one will be able to pay.  Taking money from doctors and attempting to re-manage it to accomplish more for less will not solve the problem or it would have worked by now plus it will never take us where we want to go.  What do you think would happen if collectively enough people caused the government and insurance companies to start a program that paid for services when you are well and stopped payments when you got sick?  Do you think the massive healthcare industry would now have reason to look for more ideal therapies?  Obviously this would require the phasing in of a new approach and the phasing out of the old but in time we could achieve far greater accomplishments for less money.