Paying the Bills vs. Dealing with the Costs

House Dems want to tax the rich for health care – Yahoo! News

The health care debate in the USA is increasingly focused on how to pay (meaning who will pay) to operate a dysfunctional system with costs out of control.

I fully acknowledge that in government circles, this is about the only thing they can address.

But the real question is not “How do we pay?” but “Why does it cost so much?”

The care delivery system itself is error prone, dangerous for the patients (and psychologically dangerous for the providers). The net effect is much of the effort of the dedicated, but overworked, staff is siphoned off to deal with problems and chaos that shouldn’t be there in the first place. But there is no system in place, at least not in any operation I have ever see (including some claiming to be “lean”) that systematically detects, responds, corrects, and solves those thousands of little issues that occur every day. People seem too focused on the “big stuff” that creates lots of press.

The financial system is worse. The processing of payments and claims is inefficient (which is a kind word), error prone, chaotic, unresponsive to issues and problems, and treats the patients as though deciphering the “THIS IS NOT A BILL” statements is the only thing they have to do.

Honestly, I don’t have any ideas here. I just see that we are in a political quagmire debating how to pay for a system that shouldn’t be costing half of what it does… and it isn’t about controlling over payments or sharpening pencils on the billing.

What if one major HMO actually “got it” and became the Toyota of health care. Any takers?

One Reply to “Paying the Bills vs. Dealing with the Costs”

  1. I have always been of the opinion that when something hurts bad enough, people do something about it. And I think this also applies to capitalism and running companies. Your painting a picture of a hugely wasteful healthcare system. They are apparently not suffering financially from a wasteful system.

    Every city I have lived in, I see new hospital buildings being built, and new health care buildings being built. The local healthcare people always seem to have lots of money to expand. Where does all of this money to expand their system come from? I suspect some entity in the healthcare system is making money. Lots of money. Who is it? When you find out who that is, I suspect you’ll find those “people” are the “people” that want to keep things running the way they are.

    And I’m not saying it’s bad to make money, I’m just saying the healthcare system won’t work on the waste and errors until it benefits that part of the healthcare system that is making the money.

    Am I wrong here?

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