By Sheeva Azma
Healthcare system: don’t pay for unsafe care. It’ll make us all healthier (and wealthier).
If health is wealth, why is healthcare so expensive? It feels like I pay so much for healthcare that it might be better named wealthcare.
The more health problems I have that go unresolved, the more times I have to go to the doctor, and the more tests I have to get. If it could have gotten solved the first time around, that would have saved me time, money, agony, and hassle. At the end of the day, some people get richer who were already rich, and I am supremely annoyed and teetering on broke (hey, I’m a freelance writer in the era of ChatGPT).
We’ve all had experiences where we went to the doctor and haven’t felt heard, were dismissed, or even misdiagnosed or had something go untalked about. Why are we paying for that — not only in actual money but in emotional, physical, mental, and other costs? It’s a sign that our healthcare system is broken.
If you have an issue that doesn’t get resolved and you have to go to the doctor multiple times because the doctor messed up or didn’t listen to you at your first appointment — those copays are on you. If you’re like me and pay a lot for your premium so that you can have a low copay, maybe that’s not so bad…but if you have a healthcare plan where you pay very little per month and your copay is higher or you have to meet a deductible of some thousand dollars before you don’t have to pay for your healthcare…that can all get very expensive.
Look, I’m not a scholar on how healthcare payment programs work. I’m just saying that if you bought a new gaming console and you did not like it, you can always return it for a full refund…yet when you get healthcare that isn’t helpful, or worse, makes you sicker, you still have to foot the bill.
In the end, medical errors and harm should not have happened, but they do, and when they do, that makes life more complicated and expensive for everyone involved. It serves to make people richer who simply do not deserve it.
Sure, there are some bad apples out there who run their medical offices just to conduct fraud and thrive on running up healthcare reimbursements…and the fact that that is even possible is definitely the problem.
The reason healthcare is so expensive is because the incentives are not lined up right.
If you go to the doctor, and the doctor fixes your problems…they should get paid.
If you go to the doctor, and the doctor makes your problems worse…they should not get paid, because they did not do their job.
This isn’t even my idea. It’s the idea of patient safety organizations across the United States and world. It’s a good idea, though.
The United States “spends more on health care but has worse health outcomes than comparable countries around the globe,” according to analysis from the American Public Health Association.
Up to 50% of errors in the healthcare system may be preventable, affecting 1 in 10 patients. Preventable medical errors and complications not only harm patients but also contribute significantly to increased medical expenditures, placing a burden on our healthcare system and economy.
What if healthcare enterprises that are known to harm people by not listening to them, performing surgeries improperly, providing the wrong treatment, ignoring patients, and other ways…simply did not get paid?
They would go bankrupt…and that makes sense…because they were not providing “health” care in the first place.
“But Sheeva,” you might say. “You can’t just withhold payment from our hospitals. These are our healthcare heroes.”
Well, if our hospitals could have prevented the harm to 400,000 patients a year, and even killing upwards of 200,000 of people a year, they are not doing their job…yet they are still getting paid.
What would this look like?
Simple: if a heart surgery does not fix the problem…then nobody’s getting paid until it gets fixed.
Do you see that this setup makes it so that the healthcare system actually has to provide something of value rather than just do a procedure to get paid?
That, in and of itself, would make healthcare so much worth the money we pay (and a lot less expensive, since we wouldn’t be wasting money on harmful health care).
In this era of following the money, it only makes sense to follow the money in the healthcare system, too…and if all of that money, time, energy, medical training, frustration…the list goes on…is not going to making people healthier, then we have a major problem.
And while we’re at it, let’s actually track what hospitals are doing so we can see the scope of this terrible problem. We can do that by creating a National Patient Safety Board to oversee it all. Even if you’re opposed to government spending and bureaucracy, you will be excited by the fact that eliminating preventable patient harm saves trillions of dollars each year, and could potentially (by itself) grow the world’s economy by 0.7%, according to research from the World Health Organization. What a shocking statistic. $0.70 out of every $100 dollars spent in the world on healthcare not only goes to waste, but almost certainly makes healthcare more expensive due to follow-ups, fixes, and so on!
There’s too much to be said on this topic for a single blog post, but I hope I convinced you on this healthcare reform idea. It’s a good one!
Educate yourself on patient safety by learning more at the Patient Safety Movement Foundation, Patients for Patient Safety, or reading the White House report on Patient Safety!
Fancy Comma, LLC 