The cost of heath insurance

February 20, 2008

Health care costs are staggering.

This is one of the problems we can help solve. If we could shed the

shackles of woefully inadequate fee-for-visit payment and be adequately

compensated based on the real work of primary care we would reduce the

cost of health care dramatically. MORE investment in primary care

leads to better population health and lower total health care

costs.

But it seems that instead of more investment in primary care we have

greater investment in for profit companies to make our lives harder,

drive up our costs, keep us from serving our patients and - greatest

absurdity of all - leading ultimately to greater costs.

Meanwhile all the financial incentives in the health care

" market " reward those who serve themselves through

overutilization of procedures regardless of merit. [And when did we

give up being a healing profession to become a bunch of cogs in a

business machine?]

I don't think the public has a very good understanding of this issue and

I strongly encourage any and all of you to consider writing a piece for

your local paper. I suggest that you take great care to point out

that we need to be allowed to do what is right for our patients and that

the payment system is in the way of what is right and that too many

corporations are feeding on the life blood of Americans.

Gordon

At 08:54 AM 2/20/2008, you wrote:

My

understanding is that you are able to get a group policy if you have at

least one other person working with you who is going to be covered.

Otherwise, you have to get an individual policy. Health insurance is

wickedly expensive even for the healthy and actually stands as one of the

main considerations as to whether this model will work for you

(malpractice premium being another). In other words, if you have an

illness or anyone in your family has an illness, the cost of health

insurance might preclude you from being able to open a low overhead

office.

This is one of those opportunity cost things

that I never hear make the news. How many people stay in their dead end

jobs just so they can have health insurance for their family instead of

following their dream? I bet the economic impact is staggering.

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