Healing American Healthcare

The United States is in the grip of an unsustainable spiral of escalating healthcare costs driven by an aging population and a feeding frenzy on health related revenue. Though misguided efforts to pump more cash into the system continue, truly healing what ails American healthcare requires three bold steps: 1) Coming to Terms with Profit; 2) Empowering Consumers; and 3) Promoting Healthy Lifestyles.

Coming to Terms with Profit. To stem the tide of rising costs, and to ultimately realize high quality, affordable sustainable healthcare for all Americans, we must replace the system's core driver - profit. A radical idea, true, but a necessary stroke none-the-less.

Profit in any economic endeavor is gain realized relative to costs. Normally the difference between costs and profit is "value added". Our distressed healthcare system offers innumerable opportunities for people to profit without adding value. Leveraging people's health to generate financial gain for an endless array of paper pushers, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, and overpaid corporate executives has awarded profit the supreme role in healthcare. Entrenched interests feed off a stream of seemingly endless revenue. To radically improve the system we must address profit.

In an advanced, post-industrial society health and wellbeing are more closely associated with public goods like clean air and water, viable means of commerce, and safety and security than with goods and services to be manipulated on the open market. The preeminence of profit in healthcare has become an obstacle to the goal of achieving a healthy, vital and vibrant citizenry. We must determine an appropriate role for profit in our healthcare system.

Empowering Consumers. A successful "free-enterprise" system requires educated consumers empowered to make informed choices. Our system of profit seekers administering and in effect dictating wellness regimens ensures consumers remain ignorant, ill informed and incapable of making responsible healthcare choices. The average consumer has no idea, nor under our current system any incentive to care, what a routine medical consultation does or should cost. Corporate and government interests control and seek to manipulate the process at every turn. Unfortunately too many people have their hands in the till to allow real change.

A rational, market-driven system is sustained through the choices of informed, responsible individuals. To this end, we must design and promote a national health maintenance system empowering individual consumers. Health maintenance costs must be public and transparent. Our system must allow consumers to determine "best value" from amongst and between healthcare alternatives. The ultimate objective of this medical system revolution would be to empower consumers to "heal thyself".

Promoting Healthy Lifestyles. By far, the most challenging and far-reaching effort to overhaul American healthcare is influencing "lifestyle".

People are and must be responsible for their own health and wellbeing. People collectively design and develop the environment in which they live and the lifestyles they maintain and aspire to. Educating, informing and guiding (with appropriate incentives and disincentives) people toward healthy, fulfilling lifestyles will radically alter the need for, disposition and delivery of American healthcare.

Lifestyle is the single most important determinant of quality of life. Free people choose their lifestyle and ultimately determine their own health and wellbeing. People can choose to promote health, fitness and vibrancy or choose to undermine them. The task of promoting healthy lifestyles lies with the people, not government.

Government's role in healthcare should be to: promote a fair, honest and transparent system, one not driven by profit but by wellbeing; empower consumers in a free market; and encourage and advance health affirming lifestyles. Government does not have to run healthcare, just serve to keep the system on track promoting the general welfare.

A snapshot of demographic trends reveals what looms ahead for the Unites States. An effort to sustain an aging population, prevent death at all costs, and maximize profit will place ever increasing demands on working people to afford ever more sophisticated healthcare. Under this current model the United States in on the fast track to bankruptcy. To avert fiscal disaster we must reinvent our healthcare system now.

Until we get serious about addressing profit, empowering individuals and promoting healthy lifestyles we will continue along the road to ruin. We grow, we learn, we become by the choices we make. If our health and vitality and that of our children matter, we have two choices: compete in the current system or remake that system. Let us act now to heal what ails American healthcare.


Copyright (c) 2010 Scott F Paradis