Your healthcare system through a different lens…
Imagine if you went to the grocery store to purchase a week’s worth of groceries – once in the store you had to select items without price tags or any labels suggesting which items were more expensive than others. In addition, all the items were behind counters, so that you had to ask for them from store personnel (and cannot inspect them at close range) who wrapped them in opaque paper and initialed them before handing them over. You were paying a monthly fee to be a store “club member” to get discounts, but were not told what those discounts might be.
So now once you’ve gathered all your groceries you stand in the check out line. The person in front of you is complaining about the outrageous price of her groceries, while the clerk responds that she didn’t force her to shop at the store or select those groceries, that it would have been cheaper if she were a club member, and that higher prices were assessed based on the individual store personnel initials that were on her paper wrapped items. The clerk also tells her that she cannot return any items (as once they’re wrapped, they’re considered non-refundable – and that she will be reported to a debt collection agency if she does not pay). The shopper is outraged, but since she doesn’t want her credit ruined, and there are no other stores within 100 miles, she pays the price and leaves.
Your turn comes to check out. You’re a club member so your bill is substantially less, but you can’t be sure what the individual items cost or which fees were added based upon the various initials written on the white paper. In fact, you have a feeling that the store staff added some additional packages to your cart when you weren’t looking, but you can’t be sure because of the wrapping. You pay your bill, go home, and find as you unwrap your groceries that at least half of the things you bought were not what you thought they were (or what you wanted), and that there were indeed extra items in there that you never asked to buy.
What kind of crazy scenario is this? It’s a simplified analogy of our healthcare system. The shoppers are patients, club membership is insurance, stores are hospitals, grocery wrappers are healthcare providers, and clerks are the hospital administrators. I also emphasized the lack of price transparency that is inherent in the system.
If grocery stores were actually like this, there would be a violent, nationwide revolt within days. Are consumers ready for a revolution in healthcare? I hope they are, because their collective bargaining power is probably the only thing that will force price transparency and system-wide improvements. But to make this happen, consumers should consider a few key points:
- A single payer model is nothing more than taking the grocery store system we already have and asking the store to accept a new club card whereby staff will decrease the size of the grocery items (by 50%) to those members. One of the best quotes I’ve read about the certain doom of a single payer system was recently posted in GruntDoc’s blog.
- Price transparency is the most important initial step to consumer empowerment and should be at the top of the lobbying list.
- Doctors are not the bad guys, the system is the bad guy. Physicians and patients must ally with one another to demand improvements. The AMA has taken a strong stand in favor of the consumer driven healthcare movement.
- Consumers must become active participants in their care. They need to educate themselves about their diseases and conditions and focus on early intervention and preventive medicine. As resources become more and more scarce, and the US population becomes older and sicker, healthy living practices provide the only real hope of relief from the complications of advanced disease. As Dr. Feld notes in his blog, 80% of healthcare dollars are spent on complications of chronic diseases!
I think that Revolution Health can play a critical role in consumer empowerment. Here at the “Web 2.0” social network intersection between healthcare professionals and patients, RHG can help consumers take control of their health (via education and peer support), and join forces with others like them to revolt against this unacceptable and bizarre “grocery store” system that we have in place!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
