Oh man that's a riot. Are you implying that corporations do this? Seriously, have you looked at the behavior of the leading businesses in *numerous* areas? Are you telling me that Microsoft is delivering excellence in every measurable dimension? Cell phone companies? Home contractors? If that's your experience of reality then please let me into your plane of reality. As far as I can tell, most businesses focus on a few areas, give a bare minimum of customer service, and prosper because people care about price above all else once they have something that is minimally adequate. A far, far cry from the ideal of "deliver excellence in every measurable dimension "Bill Glasheen wrote: However that doesn't mean you compete to the extent that you deliver excellence in every measurable dimension - including service to their customers.
Basic market forces at work.
Not to say that there aren't businesses doing it differently, and sometimes they do well. Google consistently delivers quality, so does newegg.com, Motorola and it's summation-based philosophy, are counterexamples. Still, the implication that corporations are necessarily interested in providing all-around excellence is pretty obviously wrong.
So what do you propose to do when it turns out that healthcare consumers are like all others and will buy the cheapest thing they see? You either need to decide that you don't care about people being ruined for life because of this particular poor choice, or you need some other option. For me, fixing the problem of financial ruin due to medical costs is part of the basic goal here. Costs may go down overall in a more efficient system, but you'll still have lots of people with bare-bones plans who really need a break-bones plan (not covered by the yearly-checkup and antibiotics plan).Minimize insurance mandates so that more "bare-boned" policies could be made available.
What would you do here? If a doctor makes a *preventable* mistake and a patient is left debilitated, what should happen? I mean we can look from a purely pragmatic view and try to make sure it doesn't happen next time, but that doesn't do the victim any good. Unfortunately, money is the only way we have of balancing things out. If there were a way to say, transfer the culprit's ability to walk over to the victim, that might be better. As it is, the best we can do is say "Well, being crippled, that s ucks a lot, so here's a few million from the person who crippled you"Tort reform.
And if you're talking about dealing with suits in cases of unpreventable mistakes, what is it you would do differently? As I understand it, those cases don't win awards anyway, though they may result in a settlement.
I am generally in favor of this, but I hope you like having your records hacked. Unless you're talking about a secondary computer network, but then we're talking many billions to set that up. Is this billions part of "all costs"? Here's the unpleasant truth about computer security: it is impossible. Just like total home security is impossible.Standardize electronic health records so that health information can be exchanged more freely between entities.
How do you define "something" in a meaningful way. What is a "something" that can be applied to a single mother working at MacDonald's, but also a single tech worker making 100k?Most health-care should cost the individual something.
Good idea. Now what about the fact that the poor make disproportionately more poor lifestyle choices? Sometimes that's by necessity... in this country it's expensive to eat healthy and super cheap to eat poorly. Really educating people about these thing sis a hard, expensive problem. And if you don't, then you're penalizing people who already probably can only afford the bare-bones service, which doesn't really cover what you need. Also, at what point do these penalties kick in? A lot of people now are growing up obese. At what point do you transfer the responsibility from child to parent?Poor lifestyle choices should cost you.
