Free the Health Care System: a Review

In response to my recent post about overmedication, Bekkieann asked what ideas I have for improving our current medical system. Having written about this many times, I thought that rather than rehash the matter, I would put up a list of some of my posts about our medical system.

• Is More Government the Answer to Our Health Care Problems? 6/29/07, a discussion of why the Massachusetts RomneyCare model is problematic
• Hillary-Care on the Incremental Plan 7/19/07, why we need consumer-friendly medicine rather than socialized medicine
• Universal Health Coverage to be Pushed in Utah in 2008 10/1/07, Governor Huntsman’s universal health coverage plan and why we need to put consumers in charge of their own medical freedoms and responsibilities
• How's RomneyCare Working Out? 1/31/08, RomneyCare’s higher than predicted costs and lesser than predicted access problems
• Huntsman Plans to Implement HillaryCare In Utah 2/14/08, why compassion by coercion is bad
• Bad Medicine 2/19/08, “We need to restore incentives that recognize the patient as the customer rather than as just a product.”
• Serving Medical Customers 2/23/08, “The only way we are going to solve today’s health care crisis is to turn patients back into actual buyers of medical services.”
Unfunded Mandate 3/21/08, Governor Huntsman’s healthcare task force is designed to mandate “that you and your neighbors have no option but to buy their products and to subsidize those that can’t afford to buy those products.”
• Real Choice Curbs Medical Expenses - Mandates Don't 4/1/08, the title is self explanatory
• Parasites 4/14/08, the power of insurance companies and government need to be reduced in our health care system to restore balance
• Ve Have Vays to Make You Buy Insurance, Comrade, 4/19/08, Utahns will be soon have Soviet style central planning applied to their health care.
• Health Care Consumerism 4/23/08, “THE ONLY way to reduce health care cost inflation is to restore Consumerism to the health care industry.”
• What are We Really Paying For? 5/19/08, much of our medical care is basically useless, but we buy into the myth of superhuman healers anyway
• Don’t Pull a Massachusetts 5/21/08, the downsides of state mandated insurance coverage in practice

Many of these posts are critical of third-party payer systems. But there are some positive suggestions about how to reform our current quasi-socialized public/private health care system. And there are some good links in these stories to various suggestions and resources.

The overriding theme that should be driven home is that we need more freedom in our system than we have today. Patients need to be freer to seek the kind of care they really want. Medical practitioners need to be freer to provide the kind of care and services that are in demand. We still need ways to help people that truly cannot afford necessary care.

Coupled with more freedom is more responsibility for the consequences of our own physical and health care decisions. Perhaps this comes across as harsh. I’m not suggesting that this would produce a perfect system by any stretch. But it will be a far less harsh system than a cold bureaucracy that follows procedures and pretends to contain costs, but still produces lousy medical outcomes.