On Things and Other Perspectives

David Goldhill, a media exec, has written an excellent article in The Atlantic on what’s really wrong with health care. He does a fantastic job of identifying some of the real underlying problems with our system:

A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing.

As I stare a at a surprise $2,000 bill for a bone scan, I can completely resonate with most of what Goldhill writes. It’s sad, but we get better service from our auto mechanics than we do from the health care system.

He argues for changes that make the patient the customer:

The most important single step we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as the single model for financing care. And a guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system. I believe if the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers—by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can’t afford care—we’d find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we’d see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result.

If you really want to know what we should be doing about health care reform – read this article.

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