The people building Citizen Health.
Even as a financial instrument, it's not getting the job done.
When merchant boats were sailing around the world for the first time, we needed a way to minimize losses. Thus, we came up with insurance.
But now, we can send millions of dollars to the other side of the world in seconds only costing pennies.
Our health & wellbeing should be treated differently than wooden boats lost at sea.
@mattrmd You're right -- The first step in fixing these problems starts with being honest and logical.
If we see constraints limiting our output, it's not smart to add more constraints. Yet we do it every year with more regulation and bad software.
I think we are exhibiting a major case of sunk cost fallacy in healthcare. For the most part, the $3 Trillion economy healthcare operates in has been an experiment for the past 100 years. While we're getting further off track each year, we continue the same irrational behavior because of the time, effort, & capital already sunk is the broken system.
Sometimes we've got to wise up and cut our losses.
For starters, I believe we can cut our healthcare costs by 50% if we change how we pay for services.
See, there's an inherent conflict of interest in the health insurance business model. For every dollar your insurer pays in claims is a dollar less that goes to their profits. So when something bad happens to you, their interests are directly conflicted with yours.
Why do we think this is a good plan? It makes terrible economic sense for 99% of the population.
Payments from patients to physicians and other healthcare providers should be quicker, cheaper, and easier. We have the technology. We just have to remove insurance from the equation.
Are we going to accept this? What can we do? Doctors, can you help here? Where do we say, "No!"? Who wants in on reclaiming data as personal property?
https://www.propublica.org/article/you-snooze-you-lose-insurers-make-the-old-adage-literally-true
@JoeCallender It is really a wonder.... But please, stop making it hard. There are so many nuances to twins. People don't grasp what we experience, from insurance blunders, to "Yes they are two different people, they like different things." (I have a Cavs fan and a Golden State fan, the Finals around here are exuberance and consolation.)
Turning to profit in healthcare. Where should we make profit? What should be done with it? How about the notion of driving down healthcare costs and the economic benefits of that? If we could inject about $10,000 into the average working family, does this have merit? Is this a good idea?
@Ed-Swann This is what we intend to do, Ed! Flip the model, change.... everything.
@MeganJanas I will start so that we all feel comfortable and can see how easily it is to share.
In 2007, my twins were born early. They needed the NICU- one for 4 weeks and the other for 5 weeks. I had this funny feeling that our insurance company was going to claim that "they didn't know that we had two babies." Which is funny, because the care, the ultrasounds- all indicated there were in fact 2 babies. So, about 2 weeks into the stay at the hospital, my husband and I walked into the billing department just to tell them, hey, we do have two little patients here, please make sure that insurance knows. We were assured, they did.
Fast forward, we get home. Bills start to show up. The largest, $240,000 was marked paid. Ok. One down.... We waited. The next showed up: $40,000. Unpaid. Reason: You didn't tell us you had 2 babies. Ummm, what? What? Are you serious? This can't be real. Oh, yeah. We got to 5 appeals out of 7. On the 5th appeal, they finally paid that last 40. But it was so stressful.
Solution: Knowing at the start of care, who will be on this policy, and the insurance company understanding that this is a very stressful time, pay the bill, would have been a great start. Hanging this over their customer's heads was irresponsible.
Having more tools at one's disposal would have alleviated this. Making sure that customers feel supported, and reassured would have made this time different. When life is in the balance, money is the very last thing you think of. With this industry, money is the first thing thought of. This needs to change. It's people, caregivers, and life first- always.
I was reminded the other day of this, when the video of a man lambasting a politician, came up in my feed. One of his lines is: "That the healthcare industry is a for-profit business is immoral." I think some profit in healthcare is a good idea. But billions in profit is hurting us, robbing us of savings, and not adding any longevity or healthy years to our lives. We can fix that, and this is why I am a part of Citizen Health.
We need to highlight this fact: Healthcare has issues! Which causes you to have issues. From medical bills to records that cannot be transferred, to everything in between. We want to know! Give us a brief description (only what you are comfortable sharing) and tell us the solution.
Share worst parts. Share the solution.
The goal is to highlight that we have major problems in healthcare. We don't have to let these things continue. We can act on them and make it better. You can tell us how!
Did you all get to see this excellent article by Dr. Atul Gawande?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers.
I want to pick it apart and have a discussion about it. There are uncovered gems waiting to be unearthed here. The ideas abound that we can act and build on....
@mattrmd I would argue that we're not having a shortage of primary care physicians. With 2 hours of computer time required for 1 hour of patient face time, we're just being inefficient with time.
100,000 physicians * 5 hours/day computer work = 500,000 extremely valuable, but wasted hours.
How many patients could be seen with those extra hours? How many lives could be saved?
