The real reason health care in America is a mess
the so-called health-care industry, which amounts to roughly one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is not an industry at all. It is a chaotic crossroads of many different industries and professions, often in fierce competition, each adapted to its own culture and pursuing its own business model.
- Insuring patients is a very different business from treating patients; both are distinct from
- the business of discovering new medicines and inventing new devices.
- The pharmacy business is different from
- the fitness business;
- suing for malpractice is unlike diagnostic testing;
- hospice care is a long way from
- digitizing medical records.
.. The late Neal Patterson often told the story of trudging from one doctor’s office to the next in one hospital after another with his cancer-stricken wife, with her heavy medical files in two shopping bags. His point: the utter lack of communication and coordination in the health-care sector. It was an especially powerful story because Patterson was the billionaire founder of one of the world’s leading health-care IT firms
.. This strikes me as an awful lot of costly disruption in service of a largely symbolic repeal. Cassidy-Graham could have been titled the Lobbyist and Consultant Full Employment Act, because it would keep a lot of people busy in state capitals and insurance company headquarters for years to come. Most Republicans like it because it’s a fig leaf to wear at town-hall meetings.
.. Unless the sector delivers a better product, consumers won’t be happy regardless of who pays. That much, at least, is not complicated.