The Institute of Medicine says we are wasting 30 cents of every dollar we spend on medical care. Originally I was going to pan the study, but I can’t resist a good read. Like this: If banking were like health care, automated teller machine (ATM) transactions would take not seconds but perhaps days or...
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As a young woman, I took over a business that was bankrupt: its liabilities exceeded its assets by a considerable amount, and the wolf was well and truly at the door. Lots of people thought I was foolish not to “erase” its debts through filing bankruptcy and be given a “clean slate” by the...
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In my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, I argue that we do not need more spending, more regulations, or more bureaucracy to fix the problems of our current system. Unfortunately, the Affordable Care Act prescribes heavy doses of all three. One outcome will be to make the problem of perverse incentives worse. Here...
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The case for liberating physicians from the dictates of third-party payers Of all the people in the healthcare system, none is more central than the physician. As I explain in my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, fundamental reform that lowers costs, raises quality, and improves access to care is almost inconceivable without physicians...
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Imagine a system in which health plans offer networks of doctors and hospitals in return for fixed premiums. People who are seriously ill and need specific, expensive medical treatment will select in a very different way from other people. As I discuss in my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, take a heart patient in...
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Lack of quality competition is in part the result of certain characteristics of healthcare quality. What we call core quality is not a variable at all. As I discuss in my recent book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, it is the result of other decisions made by the providers. Since the vagaries of medical...
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Time and again, President Obama has told us how he intends to solve our healthcare problems: spend money on pilot programs and other experiments, find out what works, and then copy it. He’s also repeatedly said the same thing about education. The only difference: In education, we’ve already been following this approach with no...
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Although we often associate the term entrepreneur with profit seeking, the healthcare field is teeming with innovators who are largely motivated by altruism. As I wrote in my new book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, take Dr. Jeffrey Brenner of Camden, New Jersey.* In any other field, Brenner would be a millionaire, but because...
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In complex systems, there are always unmet needs and problems to be solved. The more dysfunctional the system, the more numerous are the unmet needs and the more severe are the problems. In other sectors, needs to be met and problems to be solved are the fertile ground from which entrepreneurs emerge. Where is...
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There is no topic in healthcare that is more misunderstood than what other countries are doing. At both ends of the political spectrum, the mistake is the same: the belief that other healthcare systems are radically different from our own. They aren’t. Take the United States and Canada. I would say that the healthcare...
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