There are a ton of people out there on both sides of the health care reform issue these days. Here is one such article on the unintended consequences of health care reform.
I'm sure there are many, many issues here and no one person is an expert I agree. What I'm continually amazed at, is that we seem to be completely OK with not TRACKING or MEASURING our success or failure with regard to anything we do. It is no longer acceptable to Just Try Something and hope it will work. We need to know, and you do that by measurement.
It is a very simple concept. Figure out what is wrong [Health care costs are too high and rising too fast]. Determine a way to measure your problem objectively. Come up with a solution that is intended to optimize your result. Then try to determine any "unintended consequences" [like patient wait times cited above], and figure a way to objectively measure that too. After you have set up your measurement systems, designed the best system you can by discussion and determination, execute it in a small controlled environment [like a single city or state in this case]. Then watch your measures. See if you really do get what you want. Let your critics show you where you are going wrong. Make all the metrics instantly public, and, as they say, the Truth will Out.
Sounds simple, doesn't it? That's because it is. It is called the Scientific Method, and it's been around for a while, so empirical evidence indicates it works. We should try it.
Here is the kicker - you must measure your results BEFORE and AFTER the experiment to determine if you had the desired effect. This means, if lowering health care costs is your goal, then you need to objectively measure EXISTING COSTS and see if they are truly reduced. This should not be hard in this case. I'm told that, because 41 million Americans are uninsured, they must use hospital emergency rooms instead of a Primary Care Physician. This seriously drives up costs, since these folks can't pay and the costs to treat them are spread across people who can pay at each hospital in terms of higher fees. So measure these fees! If healthcare reform is successful, we should shift cost from hospital emergency rooms, which trickles down to us all in terms of higher hospital fees, to insurance premiums, right? All I'm saying is, before we do anything, put mechanisms in place to measure this cost reduction! If we actually do significantly reduce costs, then most people will be satisfied.
I think the major opposition to reform is caused by skepticism. People don't believe they will see a dime of savings. Oh, sure, they might believe that reform will significantly reduce hospital emergency room costs, but they are skeptical that the hospitals will pass the savings on in the form of reduced fees. They will simply use the money for something else. They wouldn't really do this, would they? No!
Bottom line is we need to measure what we do, and make the measurements objective and public. No one will ever trust government to simply Do the Right Thing. Prove it.
You cannot legislate one end of the problem, and hope the other end simply does the right thing. This will not work.
