Health Care Reform - Will Dr Obama Be Able To Cure The Us Health System?
Let ' s pretend that President Obama is actually Dr Obama, and that his job is to separate and treat the US Health System. What will he find, how will he go about it, and what will be the outcome?
The process of diagnosis is relatively straight forward. Everyone acknowledges that the system is inopportune and that there are a number of agreed on symptoms of this disorder. Firstly the system is far too worthy, consuming nearly twice as many dollars per capita as health systems in other Western countries. And this appraisal is also unwell focused. Over thirty per cent of our health dollars are spent on administrative non - patient care costs ( related as insurance companies costs and profits, and excessive administrative costs for providers ). We also spend twice as much on medications as other Western countries, and our reimbursement practices inappropriately reward piece standard medicine, particularly doctors who perform interventions, ( consonant as surgeons and radiologists ) instead of undertaking prevention and the treatment of chronic disorder ( consonant as primary care physicians ). Of course the existence of 47 million uninsured is a disgrace and a huge predicament, as is the relatively poverty-stricken quality of overall care provided nationally for the money spent. And someday the whole system is very patchy, with excellence provided relatively cheaply in some areas, and the opposite in many others. All this occurs in the setting of relatively little investment in electronic medical records and modern information technology, which could certainly improve the system.
So what should Dr Obama do? What is his treatment plan? If he addresses some of the problems extreme, then the task becomes clearer. It is indeed needed to introduce some formation of national public insurance program, both to ice the currently uninsured, and to equip competition for the excessive number of health insurance companies to make them reduce their rates, increase their cover, and heel better profit services. It is likely that this process will lead to many of the insurance companies animation out of business, and that is fine, considering there are way to many at contemporary, and it would be more analytical for us to have fewer improved health insurance operations. At the same time the cost of pharmaceuticals has to be addressed - there needs to be a nationally negotiated formulary for locus essential drugs that are paid out of the public wallet.
At the duplicate time the payment structure for providers needs to be changed, and more weight paid for services for chronic illness and prevention, and less for interventional medicine, while also encouraging, as is work, the use of electronic medical document systems and other health information technology initiatives. A single dangerous garniture would come if he insisted on the introduction of a national health identifier number as this would extremely increase the ability of providers to exchange health information when imperative, and would incredibly promote billing and administrative processes.
Many other things have to happen, of course, but will Dr Obama and his team be up to this task? We currently have a swimming and inefficient health system, and in any not unlike system there are winners and losers. The winners in today ' s health system are insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and vast numbers of providers who are used to taking extraordinarily high incomes for interventional services. The losers are patients, and the country. When looked at broadly, the diagnosis and treatment of our health system is actually relatively straightforward, but it has to be accepted that today ' s " winners " will not necessarily remain in that position long term, and that there will be a number of losers as we pin money the system. Let ' s just sanguineness that Dr Obama, and his multidisciplinary health planning team in Congress, are able to push through the reforms the US health system needs so that the patient is no longer the short-sighted.
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