Disappearing Health Care
A recent survey indicates that almost half of America’s primary care physicians would leave medicine if they had the opportunity. The main reason given was “red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies.” Per the same article another survey shows less than 2% of medical students are going into primary care. Insurance payments are going down and Medicare/Medicaid just don’t pay. The solution to this problem is obviously not to increase the involvement of insurance and government—the plan proposed by our next president—but to reduce it.
One step in the right direction would be to have patients pay more (or all) of the fees for primary care and to reduce (or eliminate) the share paid by insurance. A number of benefits would immediately accrue. First, physicians would receive more immediate payment (increased cash flow) and be encouraged to stay in primary care. This is crucial to avoiding a critical crisis in our health care system. They’d have less paperwork to deal with and be far less dependent on prompt payment by insurance or Medicare/Medicaid. Second, with patients responsible for a higher share of the payments they’d become more cost conscious, generating competition and driving down costs. Additionally, insurance premiums would come down as the industry moves toward plans that cover mainly, if not exclusively, major medical (e.g., surgery, chemotherapy) rather than primary care.
The current system doesn’t work. The fix is not to add more of the same (by making insurance available to everyone) but to make a fundamental change toward individual responsibility.