Tuesday, September 25, 2012
.........fact that doctors are no longer the agents of patients but instead company employees working on volume and loss prevention. Americans have thus lost advocates for their care and no one takes ownership of the patient. This will be painfully obvious to Americans seeking care in 2014.
Americans need to protect themselves. If we cannot reverse course on this legislation, we will need leverage to protect our self-interests. That leverage comes from controlling where our health care dollars go. Americans should demand Health Savings Accounts (like an IRA for health care), or, at minimum, vouchers or "premium support" for care that will give us some control and ensure that the industry responds to our individual needs.
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Saturday, July 07, 2012
The problem is that in the United States today, health insurance isn’t really health insurance after all. It is nothing like auto insurance where the driver is covered for catastrophic events that he hopes never happen. It is nothing like fire insurance which covers an event that every homeowner hopes will never happen. This is true insurance: No one hopes they’ll need it, but it they do, it’s there.
As Thomas Szasz noted in The Freeman:
What we call “health insurance” has little to do with health and nothing to do with insurance. We do not face a “health insurance crisis.” We face the consequences of a set of economic and social problems rooted in a futile effort to make the distribution of health care…egalitarian…
What we choose to call “health insurance” is, in fact, a cost-shifting masquerading as a system of insurance. We treat a public, statist political system of health care as if it were a system of private health insurance…
[As a result] Americans now view their health insurance as an open-ended entitlement for reimbursement for virtually any expense that may be categorized as “health care,” such as birth-control pills or Viagra.
And those who see through the sham, and want to take control of their own health care, and its related costs, through HSAs, now will find themselves unable to do so, all in the name of egalitarian health care.
Forbes writer Avik Roy says there is a way out of this mess:
The free-market approach to health care involves going in exactly the opposite direction: encouraging even more people to save money for their own health expenses using health savings accounts.
It’s when you pay for something directly that you are most likely to make sure that you’re paying for value.
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Wednesday, June 06, 2012
The Galen Institute's Grace-Marie Turner recently appeared on FoxBusiness Channel's show Varney & Co. to discuss the cost differential for medical services paid for by a consumer versus an insurance company. Because patients in a consumer-driven health care system have more incentive to price shop, they are able to purchase health care services at a lower cost.
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Wednesday, March 21, 2012
The cumulative impact of government interventions has given us the health-care system we have. Because it subsidizes third-party payership, it destroys any hope of price-value comparisons by consumers. Because it commits the cardinal economic impossibility of trying to subsidize everybody, the end result is not better health but higher costs in the form of rising prices and the provision of services of questionable value.
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Friday, March 16, 2012
Dr. Kenneth Fisher, MD - the President of D4PCs Michigan Chapter - has a new article in which he explains that policymakers focus on healthcare is all wrong. He makes the case that healthcare policy should strive to put patients, not the government, at the center of every healthcare decision.
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Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.
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Thursday, November 10, 2011
Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.
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Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.
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Monday, August 01, 2011
Welcome to D4PC "Morning Rounds", your daily review of healthcare news and information from Washington, DC and around the nation. These briefings will keep you up to date on recent developments and our effort to replace the PPACA with patient-centered reforms that protect the doctor-patient relationship and preserve individual freedom of choice.
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Wednesday, March 09, 2011
