The cost of health care is a huge burden on the economy, and it’s important to find ways to lower those costs.
Lowering the cost of health care is at the top of the list in terms of making things Less Bad.
Before we look at ways to fix health care, we must take a look at where we are today.
From a political standpoint, here’s what the healthcare debate has looked like for the last decade-plus, Now in Meme form!
This is what the healthcare debate has looked like for the past two decades.
As cynical as you might think that is, in terms of what it looks like to American citizens, that is basically the extent of real action taken to significantly affect the cost of health care.
Everyone understands health care costs too much, and that the care we do get isn’t good enough.
I’ll go out on a limb and say every campaign for the past 20 years, fuck it I’ll say 30 years, has had lowering health care costs as one of the central tenets. But here we are, having the same arguments over and over again.
“It is not true that life is one damn thing after another — it’s one damn thing over and over.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
This article is about ways to lower health care costs, so I’m not going to go into the many problems of the health care system, why having a healthy population is important, government inaction, or how politicians are worthless.
This is a post about real strategies to bring down the cost of health care so let’s get to it.
How Can We Bring Down Health Care Costs?
So spoiler alert, the first few headings are about the nitty gritty, specific strategies for bringing down the cost. They are important, but until we do something about the fundamental problems identified further down the chances of significantly lowering costs aren’t great.
There are innovative, brilliant, potentially world-altering ideas for improving health care out there. But unless we do something about things like our screwed-up business incentives, the influence of money in politics, the anger and hate in society, or the general malaise most of us feel… These ideas can only have so much of an impact.
Nevertheless, it’s important to talk about them. Just please make sure you at least read the headings toward the bottom. Please.
The goal is to have a healthy population, and one of the most efficient ways to reach that goal is to lower the cost of health care.
Value-Based Health Care
Recently, the crazy idea of rewarding actual health over more tests has gotten popular. So-called “value-based health care” could be a powerful way to reward health care providers for keeping people healthy, rather than making rich people richer.
Align the incentives
If we want to bring down costs, we need to get doctors and patients on the same page. The goal is healthy people, not more profits. Political types will sometimes call doctors “health care providers.” Whatever you want to call them, what’s important is to align their incentives with those of the patient. Healthcare providers should be rewarded when patients are healthy, not when they take extra tests or unnecessary drugs.
Reduce complexity
The healthcare sector is too complex. We need to bring down the number of players involved in health care, from insurance companies to middlemen. There are too many middlemen and layers of legal bureaucracy with perverse incentives involved. A simpler healthcare system would be easier to navigate and lower costs.
Dealing with the For-Profit Problem
We want to encourage competition, but at the same time we can’t have this system where we deliver cheaper and cheaper and crappier and crappier care, just to incresae stock price.
People shouldn’t be profiting from keeping people sick.
Making insurance and private care less profitable could also help reduce federal spending. One way to do this is by implementing regulations that prevent insurance companies from charging excessive premiums or denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. This could reduce the overall cost of healthcare by making it more affordable for individuals and families.
Additionally, reducing the profitability of private healthcare providers could help reduce healthcare costs by encouraging the use of more cost-effective healthcare delivery models.
Bring Down The Cost Of Drugs
The cost of prescription drugs is a huge burden on the health care system. Reducing the cost of prescription drugs could help save billions of dollars in federal spending.
Probably the best way to reduce what we spend on drugs is to get people off drugs.
We need to bring down the cost of drugs by doing things creating more competition, negotiating better prices, reforming the patent system, importing cheaper drugs, promoting the use of generic drugs, investing in research, DNA sequencing, promoting healthy lifestyles, and more.
Increase transparency
One of the major problems with the health care system is that it’s opaque. Prices are hidden, and it’s often hard to know what you’re getting for your money. We need to increase transparency so that patients know what they’re paying for and can make informed decisions about their care.
Pricing transparency
When you need a procedure, you should be able to shop around and find the best provider for you. It might be the price or it might be the quality of the doctor, or probably a combination of both. Your hospital, doctor’s office, and whatever health care provider you use, should provide a clear bill. You should be able to shop around and easily and confidently find the best care at a price you understand.
Transparent and Trustworthy Reviews
One of the reasons Amazon became as big as it did was because f the reviews. We see the stars and we see the number of reviews and we get an idea of what other people thought about the product. We should be able to do the same for healthcare providers.
You see restaurants with the “Review us on Yelp” stickers up, providers should do the same thing (although I’d prefer something different from Yelp! because they seem to do a lot of shady stuff.
This is happening, but it’s not great. You can see doctors’ reviews on Google, and my insurance company has a thing where people leave reviews.
But there are just a handful of reviews, and they are spread out over many platforms. We need a better system for gathering and disseminating reviews of health care providers.
There are Ways to Lower Health Care Costs
We just need to do them.
Reducing the cost of healthcare and promoting cost-saving measures could help reduce spending by everyday people as well as the federal government. In the long term, it will help bring down federal debt and decrease the cost of living for everyone. But it’s important to balance these efforts with maintaining access to quality healthcare for all Americans.
The above are just some ideas in the ether. But there are many more ways to reduce the cost of health care, which we’ll be exploring more in the coming weeks and months.
What do you think are some of the best ways to reduce the cost of health care?
