American health care system is a complete and utter mess. It spends about twice as much as France, Sweden, the UK, and other developed countries. You can check these ways to make your wallet for cryptocurrency safer.
Many books have been written about this hard-to-understand subject. I think the government’s involvement is the problem. This makes it harder for people to compete in the free market, which is bad.
Regulatory capture is easy because there are too many rules and the government is too involved in the market. This has led to the rise of a whole group of people whose job is to get in the way of patients and medical workers in order to make money.
It makes people use drugs and surgery when they don’t need to, and they don’t know about the best practices in lifestyle medicine that could treat and cure chronic illness at its source. People take medicines they don’t need because of this, which makes it hard for doctors. It also means doctors have less freedom because they usually have to get permission from insurance companies before starting treatment.
What went wrong? The Austrian school of economics says that these inefficient market dynamics were inevitable once the country moved away from a sound money standard, which happened when President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.
In Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet,” Marcellus says the famous line “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
In 1997, he opened the Surgery Center of Oklahoma with Dr. Steven Lantier, who is also an anesthesiologist. The goal was to make it possible for people to get high-quality elective surgery at prices they could afford. They didn’t want to use money from the government or from private insurance companies. The prices had to be clear, too.
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma is a unique business for a number of reasons, such as:
On their website, all of their prices are listed, so anyone can look at them. These prices include not only what the surgeon, anesthesiologist, and facility charge, but also how much they charge for the surgery itself.
More than half of their customers don’t live in the same state as them. Some of these people don’t have health insurance, and even if they did, they couldn’t afford surgery or would have to wait a long time for elective surgery in their home country.
They told everyone how often people get sick after surgery in their hospitals. Most hospitals and surgeons try to hide this important measure of quality.
People who work in medicine are the only ones who own and run them.
Most importantly, they don’t work with any third-party payers and only accept payments directly from patients (even in bitcoin). They only charge for the services they offer and won’t take any other kind of payment.
The results that the surgery center got should be enough proof to speak for themselves. When everything is considered, the prices for elective procedures are usually one-hundredth of what they would be at a local hospital. When a patient goes to a hospital that is owned by a company, they may be able to get their whole operation done for less than their insurance deductible.
Even though there has been inflation for almost 25 years, most prices have not gone up since 1997 in nominal terms. Many prices have gone down or only gone up a little bit, but people are getting more for their money because care packages are getting bigger. Physical therapy after surgery is a good example of this.
When a surgeon from outside the hospital gives the wrong diagnosis, the patient usually isn’t allowed to have surgery on the first review. Surgeons who work at the surgical center have some of the lowest rates of infections after surgery, and it’s common for patients to be turned away.
A “Silk Road” for in-person medical treatment that focuses on surgical procedures. A proof of concept for a good health care system that’s also good for the environment.