Anthem’s recent announcement of a 39 percent increase in health insurance premiums provides proof-positive that health insurance and other middlemen are the problem with healthcare in
American policy makers are locked in a paradigm from which they are unable to envision a world of healthcare delivery without health insurance and managed care.
If the reader will pardon the cliché, it is a perfect example of being unable to “think outside the box.”
Once again we ask the question: If we truly wish to provide universal healthcare (access to comprehensive healthcare for all Americans) what value do health insurance and managed care provide? What value do Medicare and Medicaid provide?
Don’t these entities exist to limit access to care to only those people who are covered by a given health plan? Don’t these entities exist to restrict delivery of healthcare to only those services and procedures that are covered by a patient’s health plan?
If we decide, as a nation, to provide healthcare to all, keeping health insurance and other third-parties in place is nothing more than a grand case of featherbedding.
Like all parasites, all these entities would do would be to siphon off healthcare dollars. We simply cannot afford to spend a single healthcare dollar on activity that has nothing to do with the direct provision of healthcare to patients.
The challenge, of course, is to accomplish this without resorting to socialized medicine. Here at The Reconstructhealthcare Blog and in the author’s book, Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, we introduce a uniquely American solution to the problem of healthcare in American; one that rejects socialized medicine.
Unfortunately, many Americans confuse the terms “socialized medicine” and “universal healthcare.”
Universal healthcare simply means providing healthcare to all people.
Socialized medicine, which is a government-run healthcare program (like Medicare or like the Canadian system), is just one way to provide universal healthcare.
Our message is that: if we are able to apply a little American ingenuity and “think outside the box” (apply a systems-thinking approach) we can rebuild the system in a way that it can provide universal healthcare while avoiding socialized medicine and, simultaneously, while preserving the great strengths of the American healthcare.
The reader is challenged to open his or her mind to the possibility that there is a solution outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom.
