The real question isn't "at what cost" as much as "who will pay for it".Originally Posted by Rocker Ute
Someone has to pay for it. Healthcare costs are not coming down, insurance companies don't want to pay for it, and the people who need it can't afford it.
The healthy pay for it.
And that is fine, that is the way to pay into it. I look at the hundreds of thousands I pay into healthcare over a lifetime with the hope that my relative non-utilization will cover me when I do need it. But how can we make that healthy pool bigger?
Long ago I worked for SelectHealth. We spent a lot of time developing some online programs aimed at improving people's health. We had health trackers, health assessments, programs for employers to execute to reduce their utilization. Preventive care visits, which I mock that I now get for free (for only triple the premium I used to pay) are also a good thing. Exposing people more to the actual cost of care will also reduce utilization and ultimately cost. Prevention and better utilization are a big way to help, yet nobody really does much about that.
One example from back in the day: The discussion was around a new gamma knife that basically improved recovery time by a day, but was massively more expensive than the current gamma knife they had. The question was should the new knife be covered by insurance or was it elective. Now if you don't pay directly for that knife, then recovering a day faster seems awesome. If the patient was asked if they'd pay $10k extra to use that knife, suddenly an extra day didn't seem so bad at all.
Those are just a few of the problems with the utilization and cost of healthcare that seem relatively easy to fix, but nobody addresses that.
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