It is good to see someone trying to find a way to make common sense decisions under existing health care law. Of course all that is being done could be done under a single payer system as well.
Unfortunately, they are (at this point) an unusual experiment. I’ve seen more common problems developing where hospitals acquire medical practices and then dictate that doctors can spend no more than ten minutes with a patient, urge them to require patients to come back for separate appointments if they bring up a new health issue and make sure doctors refer patients to the hospital for lots of tests. If doctors fall short in these areas they get fired. This even happens at so-called non-profit hospitals because they also want to maximize revenue. Too often profits come first.
And, even worse is the new trend occurring over the last year of insurance companies, not the Kaiser or Geisinger types, buying up health care providers. These insurance companies, with their terrible history of maximizing profit at the expense of patient care, will then control the funding for medical services, dictate who patients can see and dictate to doctors how they can practice medicine. Insurance companies who are seeking profit first are the wrong people to be making these types of decisions.
I found his comments about hospitals disappearing if they can not make it in the market to be disturbing. That is going to result in many communities losing hospitals. Indeed, this is already an all too common trend that will accelerate. No doubt where those communities will be — poor, working class and middle class neighborhoods. These people will be denied the type of rapid response that wealthier neighborhoods that can make it in the profit-based system and that will mean more deaths.
There will always be some good people doing good things in the market-based, insurance-dominated health system (a lot of doctors and health providers take that path because they want to help people), but sadly we will find that the profit driven system more often than not will put profit ahead of patient necessities as it already does.
K. Z.
