Keep It Simple Today: Support actions that further consumer goals and discourage the other stakeholders, medical services providers, health insurers and governments from "selling" consumers on programs that don't really benefit consumers directly. The purpose of this blog is to clarify the stakeholders in the health services "crisis" and to highlight the need for our continued attention and effort in preserving consumer goals of the best health services available at the most affordable price. The "best" health services is further broken down to affordability, access, and quality of services. As part of that endeavor, we have found that our interests are often not furthered by medical provider goals and health insurer goals that often put money ahead of affordability, access and quality needs of patients. Often too, government, seeking to include the "most" people in legislation often spends time, money and legislation that in fact applies to many but benefits few because of aims to satisfy the strong physician lobbies and health insurance lobby.
Keep it Simple Today and accept our responsibility as consumers, the backbone of the money system that sustains medical services providers, health insurers and governments to present a cohesive view of our expectations of the system we support. We need affordable, accessible and quality health care. Every action taken by the other stake holders must address these needs.
1- Health insurers must INSURE: meaning they must cover the risk of the COST of treating illness. Every other action they take, including the provision of the finite costs of "preventive" check ups are only to benefit themselves and their bottom lines. Therefore, health insurers must abide by legislative mandates of covering the risk of the cost of treating illnesses and every limitation on such coverage is counter to our interests. As consumers, we only care about health insurance companies that cover the risk of cost of treating illness and therefore, we support legislative mandates (requirements) of coverage and we support efforts to make sure that our premium dollars go for medical treatment and care (the utilization rate) which must exceed its current level of less than half of every consumer dollar going for medical services for the consumer.
2-Medical services must begin complying with price controls and if they can't, our governments MUST begin instituting such price controls. Consumers should NOT be responsible for maintaining and increasing physician salaries in response to physician threats that they will not accept patients with specific insurance (such as recently occurred with Medicare). Consumers must be unafraid to demand such price controls and must begin such fearless demands with objections to the giving in of the bully tactics that resulted in Medicare increases.
3-Government must begin by suspending the government benefits packages at every level of government that remove incentives for our representatives to realistically work towards consumer goals. Once government employees share in the experience of the consumer, change will occur.
4-Consumers need to stop supporting knee jerk sales pitches that have resulted in the mistaken notion that there is a free market in the health services industry because that mistaken notion means that ONLY medical services providers and health insurers are dealing with our governments to achieve changes, leaving the consumer out.
Keep it simple today and don't toss out our system but clarify what we need from our system.
