The Separation Of Medical And Money

[Theory5]

Hey, Hows it going everybody? I haven't been on in a loong time.

Last night I had an awesome idea. We have been looking at this healthcare system all wrong. Since most of America doesn't want universal healthcare due to our problem with material wealth nobody has been able to find a really helpful fix that works for all parties. But I looked at this problem a different way, and saw that no matter how you work it money is still an issue.

So I jumped to the next logical conclusion, taking money out of the equation.

How does that work, you ask? Well from what I understand most hospitals are run like a business. They have a board of directors, CEO and CFO. Therefore they need to make business decisions, not moral ones.

Do you see the problem now? No? wait, What? Your a right-wing nutcase?

Well, In other countries such as Canada and France the normal wait time for an emergency room visit is 15 - 20 minutes. In America it's anywhere from 2 - 7 hours depending on the time of day. If you are in the emergency room its probably for a good reason, right? I assume that the people who have lost bits or have incredible pain go first, but what about people with conditions that can cause damage while you wait, or really need help? Do they just wait? Apparently they do, its not like they can go to the competing hospital next door, many hospitals deal with entire counties by themselves.

So in a sense hospitals have a sort of monopoly. Seriously. And the government can't do anything because a real monopoly is defined as being the only or the largest (by far) company in a certain field.

 

So now we take money out of the equation. How do we do that?

I have two different ways

way #1 Isolate the entire healthcare industry. Anybody with basic economic knowledge knows that this probably won't work.

 

way #2 Stop the medical industry from gouging us. Ok, In most other countries medicine costs less than a fraction of what you pay here. In Cuba (which has better healthcare by the way, and they KILL their citizens) you can get a few months worth of medicine for less than $5 USD (based on the movie "Sicko"). I think its because the medicine companies realized they could gouge the insurance companies by having ridiculous prices in America. But that puts a strain on everybody's wallet due to co-pays and your insurance not covering certain medicine. So regulate prices. Its simple really, just go by the average market price by adding up the average within each country (3-5 countries max) then adding that up.

Ok so we figured out how to regulate prices, what next? Well a hospital needs equipment, rent, and money to pay the doctors.

Equipment: I haven't figured out how this will work yet.

Rent, taxes, and utilities: well I doubt a hospital rents, but exempt the hospital from paying taxes or utilities. Use utilities taken straight from the town or city, also add green options such as solar panels to help the hospital.

Paying the Staff: Create a credit system. Doctors get paid in credits. There will be a credit system. These credits only have restricted monetary value. The staff can either exchange the credits for cash in their bank account with a bank, or a bank will be founded to facilitate the change between credits and money, so companies won't have to deal with the hassle of these credits. Also the staff gets free housing, or they are given money to purchase their own house with.

 

Ok, so that gets rid of money problems, but the hospitals can't just hire tons of doctors, that would result in too many doctors. Therefore there needs to be a medical staff pool. You have the basic staff people who are already there and the basic minimum requires to maintain the hospital, and then you have these staff that work in a 'pool'. Wherever these doctors are needed most they will go. So if One hospital has to deal with a major accident, doctors from the pool go over there. And there will be night doctors as well, to keep the wait time down in the ER.

 

This is my fix to keep hospitals from worrying about money. Because when people worry about money they start cutting corners, and when they cut corners in the medical industry people can get hurt or die.

So if you remove money from the hospital the hospitals don't need massive amounts of money to keep running.

 

What do you think?

[HydrogenBond]

The laws of supply and demand says that if the demand increases for goods and services, the supply gets tight and the price will rise. With medical costs rising, according to the laws of supply and demand, the supply has gotten tighter because the demand has increased. The question becomes what has increased the demand? If the demand is natural that means people are getting sicker and sicker in spite of medical care supposedly getting better and better. If the demand was created artificially, it means something has created a subjective need for medical goods and services, beyond the natural cause and effect of sickness.

 

Maybe a possible parallel was the housing bubble. The free market was altered by the government to get more people into the housing market via affordable housing. This increased demand for housing, because loans became easier to come by, causing house supply to get tight, and the price to rise. This worked in the short term, until the terms of the loans changed, then there was a market correction that led to many people losing their homes, with the price of housing taking a dive.

 

In the case of the housing bubble, the government started this with the idea of affordable housing for all, using a Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac guarantee. With that guarantee in place, business started to take more risk loaning money as well as push the buying of housing, by offering terms that got people into the system in an inflating market.

 

Relative to the health care, a similar path is being followed. Business is anticipating a boom and is gearing up which is raising costs. What they are assuming is some form of government medical Fanny Mae guarantee, through forced taxation laws to keep the medical bubble growing. The next step is business offering higher risk incentives, since it will be guaranteed. This pushes demand and inflates the prices. If history repeats itself, this will work in the short term, but eventually the bubble will burst and the prices will fall with depreciation within the medical industry. Then there will be a slow market correction.

 

Your thesis is to separate money and medical. This shows what can happen.

[Theory5]

What surprises me the most is that the government obviously has analysts to predict and monitor this stuff, but they don't seem to see the obvious problems.

Anyways, your models show what happens in the relatively short term. My plan would be to flesh my idea out, chop it up into small steps, and slowly integrate it into the market over the course of a decade or so, with help from the largest companies in the industry.

 

Also, when the government did that affordable housing thing, didn't the banks take advantage of that and start giving out bad loans like candy? Before I implemented my idea regulations would have to be tightened until such time as the market is deemed stable.