The Unbreak Campaign – a Declaration Of Independence
Doctors’ Declaration Of Independence is an excellent Forbes article about a group of doctors seeking new models of healthcare and forming The Unbreak Campaign. What follows is an inspiring video from one of the doctors and my posted response to the article.
The Unbreak Campaign is a Move in the Right Direction
The Unbreak Campaign seems to seek answers to the same questions that Steven Brill did in his 38-page TIME report, “A Bitter Pill: Why High Medical Bills are Killing Us.”
“Why does a single drug cost thousands of dollars?” “Why do lab tests done over a few days while in the hospital cost as much as a new car?” “Why are tax-exempt ‘nonprofit’ hospitals among a town’s most profitable businesses, employing the most workers and run by the most richly compensated executives?” “And why is technology driving up health care costs instead of lowering them?”
Brill’s report unfortunately remains locked behind a subscriber paywall, but a summary and video intro by the author is available at https://www.mhealthtalk.com/why-high-medical-bills-are-killing-us/. Brill does NOT blame doctors but instead blames a Medical Industrial Complex that includes drug companies, testing companies, equipment providers, hospitals, and insurers who all profit perversely from illness and injury. This group perpetuated the fee-for-service model that financially encourages doctors to test more, treat more, prescribe more, and generally do more.
I’d add medical schools to the problem group too, because they teach new docs how to diagnose and treat symptoms, with relatively little study of health, wellness and prevention, or the pillars of health: nutrition, exercise and sleep. After all, prevention eliminates profitable opportunities to deliver healthcare.
I applaud the #Unbreak doctors for seeking new models rather than working within an old broken one, but I think the biggest health reform benefits will come from better aligning incentives to focus on population wellness, and a healthier and more productive workforce with skin in the game and that makes better lifestyle decisions. That disruptive approach could conservatively cut our nation’s healthcare costs in half while delivering better outcomes. But since that would also cut annual revenues by $1.5 trillion, the medical industrial complex spends three times as much on political lobbying as the military industrial complex to avoid that.
UPDATE: The medical-industrial complex reportedly has spent $5.36 billion since 1998 lobbying in Washington. That’s even larger than the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by the oil and gas corporations over the same period.
More Videos by ZDogMD
ZDoggMD has been described as the funniest healthcare speaker / rapper ever — probably the ONLY healthcare speaker / rapper ever — but he uses his gift to educate the public on important issues. You can find his other videos here.
