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Patients And Physicians Must Control Healthcare Costs

The primary stakeholders in the healthcare system are patients and physicians. The incentives for patients and physicians to save money are non existent. The secondary stakeholders have taken advantage of non existent incentives to create a healthcare system that generates ever increasing costs.

Patients and physicians are the only stakeholders that can control costs. They initiate the use of the healthcare system’s resources.

Healthcare costs for medical procedures such as an MRI or CT scan have been found to vary by as much as 683% in the same town, depending on which physicians patients choose, according to a study by Change: Healthcare.

The implication is that individual physicians are responsible for the differences. Most physicians do not own MRIs, CAT scanners or PET scanners. Secondary stakeholders own the equipment. They price the procedures and profit from the equipment, not the physicians. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Obamacare Unraveled: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It is hard to remember all the defects in President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act at once.

President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act is so flawed it cannot possibly work as it was intended. It must be repealed. A serious, thoughtful, practical and common sense way to “Repair The Healthcare System” must be enacted before all the stakeholders have adjusted to President Obama’s coming changes that will create a more dysfunctional system.

A reader sent me a photo of a poster hanging in his local ice cream store. It is a reminder of previous criticisms of President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act.

Harrys ice cream 2

Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Economic Incentives Motivate: What We Can Learn From The Rand Health Insurance Experiment

The use of economic incentives to motivate behavior is neither a Democratic or Republican idea. It is human nature to be motivated by economic incentives. The concept of individual responsibility is an American idea. It has been tarnished in recent years.

There is no question in my mind that government has the responsibility to be compassionate and help the needy. It is my view that government should help individuals help themselves.

The costs associated with Medicare and traditional healthcare insurance are rising. Every stakeholder points a finger at the other stakeholders as the cause.

President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act is raising costs higher in anticipation of cuts in the future. He is in the process of forcing individuals to be more dependent on the government rather than promoting individual responsibility.

Obamacare will fail to control costs.

All anyone has to do is look at a Rand Corp. study of 29 years ago to see what works and what doesn’t work. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

More Employers Are Dropping Healthcare Insurance Coverage

McKinsey Quarterly has reported its survey concluding there will be a radical restructuring of employer-sponsored health benefits (ESI) as a result of President Obama’s following the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Healthcare insurance rates have already skyrocketed as a result of anticipating the conditions of Obama care. President Obama has been powerless to do anything about the increases.

Thirty percent (30%) of companies providing ESI to their employees will drop healthcare insurance coverage once Obama care takes effect in 2014.

The survey included 1300 employers providing ESI across industries, geographies, and employer sizes. Other surveys have found that as we get closer to 2014, President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act will provoke a much greater number of employers to drop employer sponsored healthcare insurance.

The penalty for not providing healthcare insurance coverage is much cheaper than providing healthcare coverage.

McKinsey’s survey suggests that when more employers become aware of the new economic and social incentives embedded in Obamacare the percentage of employers dropping ESI will Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Why Many Disagree With Obama’s Implementation Of ACOs

The sooner President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act (Obamacare) is repealed the faster we will be able to get on with healthcare reform that will work for all stakeholders. President Obama figured that 30 existing and successful integrated medical care organizations would be in the first group of clinics to join and be included in his Accountable Care Organization (ACO) system of care.

ACOs are a critical part of Obamacare’s goal to provide affordable, universal and quality healthcare. ACOs are really HMO’s on steroids. ACOs are supposed to be better versions of HMO’s.  The public and physicians despised HMO’s because of its control over patient choice and access to care.  President Obama thinks Medicare will save over $500 billion dollars a year with ACOs.  Unfortunately for President Obama, neither the CBO nor the Medicare actuaries believe it.

So far at least 4 of President Obama’s premier integrated healthcare organizations have Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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