Top Five Priorities for Fixing America’s Healthcare System
I address this topic from a different perspective. My 30 years of experience at IBM, where I retired in 1999 as a market strategist, causes me to also look for the root causes of big problems and work to fix them systemically. That’s one reason I founded Modern Health Talk in the first place, and a reason for working with the folks at Intelligent Sleep, knowing how sleep affects our health, safety & performance. Below are my top 5 priorities for fixing America’s healthcare system. It’s based on the overall impact each would have, ignoring than the difficulty of implementing them. I’d like to hear your priorities in the comments section below.
(1) Fix the Political Process — To truly fix America’s healthcare system, we must fix the political process and get big money corruption out. This is my top priority because of the enormous public benefits of simply becoming average, and matching the spending and health outcomes of other rich nations. Americans currently spend more than $3 trillion/year, which is twice as much as other advanced nations. Even with that, we still don’t cover everyone and generally live sicker and die younger. So theoretically, we should be able to cut costs in half or more while improving outcomes. But such health reforms face political headwinds from wealthy incumbents who fear losing revenue. This medical industrial complex spends twice as much on lobbying as the military industrial complex and could even justify spending a trillion dollars in one election cycle to avoid losing $2 trillion per year.
(2) Teach Health & Wellness — To fix our healthcare system, we must stress health & wellness more than medicine and sick care. Besides reducing healthcare costs, a national priority on the health of our citizens would have a dramatic effect on overall productivity, global competitiveness, GDP and lifestyle. The savings could be applied to paying down the national debt, and the effort would be well worth it. But our medical schools teach doctors how to diagnose and treat illness with almost no time spent on prevention (nutrition, exercise & sleep) or wellness (mind, body & spirit). That has resulted in a “sick care” system with financial incentives to test more, prescribe more, and do more, all of which drives up costs without really improving wellness or addressing the causes of poor health.
(3) Embrace Technology — Understand and exploit the exponential technology trends as you consider how telehealth, retail clinics, digital technologies, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence allow traditional medical care to move down-market from doctors in hospital & clinic settings to less expensive physician assistants, nurse practitioners, RNs & LVNs, health techs and consumers themselves. That’s a natural trend as digital health technologies make devices smaller, cheaper, more accurate, and easier to use, and it’s a trend that we should embrace, but many in the medical community feel threatened by it and resist.
(4) Change the Incentives — Employer-provided health insurance often functions as prepaid medical care and removes the consumer incentive to seek value in care and lifestyle decisions. The move toward high-deductible policies was a good step, especially with consumer rating tools like Yelp & Angie’s List to help us compare options. Because patients in severe pain or facing death are not in a good position to comparison shop, other nations do that for them and set price controls. I’m a fan of doing that here too, moving toward a single-payer universal care system, but careful not to remove the incentives to make healthy decisions. So, part of the national strategy must include consumer education stressing health & wellness and the important role they must play.
(5) Encourage End-of-Life Discussions — Over 50% of healthcare costs come from less than 5% of the population, often during the last few months of life or to treat chronic illness. So, I believe we need to get over the political correctness of Sarah Pailin’s “death panels” and begin the discussion of death-with-dignity as a more humane option rather than extending suffering and all cost.
Related Articles:
https://www.mhealthtalk.com/moores-law-and-the-future-of-healthcare/
https://www.mhealthtalk.com/101-minitrends-in-health-care/
https://www.mhealthtalk.com/another-essay-on-health-reform-and-insurance/
