Current issues: Healthcare Reform:

With rising healthcare concerns I was inspired to write this thought. I am very upset with Barrack Obama not rolling up his sleeves and getting into the details of the new healthcare reform. Where each change affects another and then another. Each move must contrast the good and negative affect and find an acceptable balance or an elimination of windfall gains. With capitations on tort law suites; do you ever hear someone winning five million in damages and ever fund the system that wrong them for improvement of healthcare? A person of good conscious would be compelled to. High yielding law suites hurts everyone; it is not just about one person’s loss, when does a society become the number of one? It sure seems that way or maybe a society of two the lawyer sure gets his hansom share! But in the end we are all paying for that wrongful death with higher malpractice insurance as well as higher premiums for the insured. I would hope that Great learning develops great minds, but at late I am dismayed.
One global concept to use to start working your primus in healthcare reform should be in “Marketing Power”; allow me to explain this principle.
Some observers believe that provider market power explains much of the outlier status of U.S. health expenditures compared with those of other nations. According to this view, when payers have market power, costs rise more slowly; when providers or suppliers wield market clout, costs increase more rapidly. When health insurance developed in Canada, the market power of the sole payers of health services, provincial governments, enabled those payers to restrict prices paid to hospitals and physicians. In contrast, the U.S. health insurance industry was initially dominated by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, institutions that were controlled by hospitals and physicians. This uncontested provider market power allowed lucrative reimbursement formulas for hospitals and physicians. These formulas were replicated in Medicare as a result of the influence of Blue Cross, Blue Shield, the American Hospital Association, and the American Medical Association over the writing of Medicare regulations. In addition, the pharmaceutical industry has deterred most governmental regulation of drug prices by using its influence over legislators. The result of the historical domination of providers and suppliers over payers has been a price structure far different from that of health care in most developed nations.
Provider market power can be curbed in 2 ways: by the countervailing power of purchasers and payers (governmental and private) and by governmental regulation.
Regulation of hospital and physician prices began to appear in the 1980s; the countervailing power of purchasers and payers grew in the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, but then waned. However, the prices of health services preceding those developments were already high relative to prices in other nations, and this historical gap has persisted.

Reference:

Thomas Bodenheimer, MD, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of
California, San Francisco Retrieved from; Annals of Internal Medicine