Is there a better model for health care?
Recently, I've been doing so much research and analysis of advanced cancers, it struck me that we spend millions of dollars on healthcare at the end of life when it likely won't have much impact, yet the real change happens when we catch and treat, or preferably prevent, diseases such as cancer earlier. This is not exactly rocket science.
Maybe we need a change in approach?
By that, I mean a greater focus on prevention, health and wellness rather than medicate and palliate end of life care.
How much of illness is as a result of poor body management, for want of a better term? Obesity, cardiovascular disease, sedentary lifestyles and lack of exercise all take their toll.
Most people don't do anything until a major wake-up call comes, but by then, it may well be too late do much.
What we need is a wellness model and people educating themselves to take better care of things earlier and having more responsibility for their choices. After all, we can't expect an unlimited pot to be available at the end of the rainbow to cover the inexorable rising cost of treatment. That's totally unrealistic and impractical.
Eventually, the pot runs out and there is no more.
What then?
4 Responses to “Is there a better model for health care?”
It’s things like this that really annoy me:
http://bit.ly/d0i36P
Want a shake or soda and fries with that? Super size?
And the campaign was linked linked with the Susan Koman Breast Cancer program?
*face palm*
With so much of the illness faced by first world nations being the result of largely preventable illness, we are spending huge amounts of dollars that could be put to far better uses. Much has been written about the dollar value of prevention and an increasing body of research indicates that rather than education or punishing bad behavior, incentives are the best means to get people to live healthy. If such an approach is effective, then financially we could get far better return on investment by spending money on the incentives than spending it on care for preventable illness.
Incentives work fine when you have “skin in the game”, much like car insurance. Don’t get tickets or in accidents, take a driving course, and we reduce your premiums. There are health insurance programs that work the same way (annual fitness exams with counseling, weight loss or smoking cessation programs) and we reduce your premiums. Problem is, when your health insurance is “free” (medicare, medicaid, to a large extent the Obama health reform), how do you incent? Making patients responsible for their choices works. Even with subsidized health care (which we all agree has to occur in some portion of the population), if we make it “your money”, and not some third party’s (insurance, government) money, we have a chance.
Dan Pink’s new book, Drive, suggests that people are more intrinsically motivated that many realise, but how this could be applied to healthcare I’m not sure. Apathy, indifference and ignorance all seem to play their part in the procrastination though.
Some one reminded me on Facebook a truism:
“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money [to spend].” ~ Margaret Thatcher
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