A Medical Doctor Weighs in on Health Care
This is a good quote speaking to the rationality of good health care as being based on the relationship between doctor and patient. Mark Sklar writing in the WSJ:
The patient should be the arbiter of the physician's quality of care. Contrary to what our government may believe, the average American has the intellectual capacity to judge. To give people more control of their medical choices, we should move away from third-party payment. It may be more prudent to offer the public a high-deductible insurance plan with a tax-deductible medical savings account that people could use until the insurance deductible is reached. Members of the public thus would be spending their own health-care dollars and have an incentive to shop around for better value. This would encourage competition among providers and ultimately lower health-care costs.
By contrast, the Affordable Care Act's plans for establishing "medical homes"—a team-based health-care delivery model—and accountability-care organizations will only add more bureaucracy and enrich the consultants and companies organizing these entities.
To improve quality, we need to unchain health-care providers from the bureaucracies that are strangling them fiscally and temporally. We can better control medical costs if we strengthen physicians' relationships with their patients rather than with their computers.