With health care reform and the creation of a retail marketplace to buy health insurance via exchanges, the future of healthcare delivery has become cost shifting from employers to employees. What will health care look like in 15 to 20 years? Think car insurance and retirement planning. In a future post, I will cover how health care will look like retirement planning. This new reality will impact both patients and doctors in a very different way. Auto Insurance – Don’t Use It! People will trade low premiums for higher deductibles. In auto insurance, people avoid filing claims for fear of increasing future premiums and access alternative services like windshield repair and body shops to get the job done without using insurance. This will also occur with high deductible health insurance as now it will be essentially catastrophic health insurance and not comprehensive health insurance. This is a perceptive championed by […] Read More »
Tag Archive for consumer driven health care
Healthcare Future in 2030 – Think Car Insurance. Doctors Will Work for Walmart and CVS.
Posted on September 23, 2014
Make the Most Out of Your Doctor Office Visit – You Just D.A.T.E.D. Your Doctor!
Posted on June 27, 2014
Book excerpt from The Thrifty Patient -Vital Insider Tips for Saving Money and Staying Healthy You Just D.A.T.E.D. Your Doctor You’ve told your story. Your doctor gets it. He has completed the physical exam. He formulates a plan to get you better. The next skill you should master may be as important as being a great storyteller. Your doctor has told you the treatment plan. Do you remember what you need to do? A 1996 study at the Mayo Clinic showed that patients remember less than half of what physicians tell them during office visits. Of nearly six hundred patients who were asked to recall what diagnoses physicians had discussed with them, 54 percent could not remember the major problems. Of patients whose doctors had discussed with them the risk factors for heart disease, 68 percent did not recall any discussion about tobacco use, 62 percent did not remember […] Read More »
The problem with health insurance exchanges. The risk for patients. Pension plan to 401k analogy.
Posted on October 3, 2013
With the implementation of health insurance exchanges in October 2013 and the beginning of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, there is tremendous risk for the American public to be worse off. Certainly the millions of Americans who currently are uninsured because their employers do not offer insurance coverage and those with pre-existing conditions unable to purchase affordable individual coverage, will benefit. It is those with employer based insurance coverage who may lose. They just don’t know it yet. Employers have found it difficult to absorb the rising health insurance premiums and costs, which have increased faster than inflation. They have tried many ways to slow health care spending including requiring employees to have more “financial skin in the game” to encourage them to make “smarter” choices about their health care. They’ve done this with higher deductibles and co-pays and requiring employees to pay a larger percentage […] Read More »
The Thrifty Patient – Book Review / Testimonials
Posted on July 15, 2013
I’m humbled and privileged to review high praise and testimonials for my book –The Thrifty Patient: Vital Insider Tips for Saving Money and Staying Healthy from those working hard to make health care more accessible, higher quality, and more affordable. In an ideal world, our health care system would be incredibly simple to access, extremely convenient, and intensely personal. It would allow patients to focus on staying healthy and healing and getting the right preventive care and treatment the first time and every time. It would not have them worrying about medical errors, wrong site surgeries, unnecessary surgeries / procedures / treatments, their own (patient) safety among other things. We are not there yet. Nevertheless, those who have provided the testimonials are also making our future system that much better though their work, actions, and words. As we all build to fixing our health care system completely, books like The […] Read More »
Recasting the Patient as Consumer – Good Idea? Consumer Driven Health Care?
Posted on June 13, 2013
Are patients now consumers? I recently jumped at the opportunity to attend the 2013 Healthcare Innovation Summit at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Subtitled IT-Enabled Disruption, it featured opening keynote speaker Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Stanford psychologist and lecturer Dr. Kelly McGonigal, and many other interesting people asking – how do we change health care? Recasting the Patient as Consumer As a practicing primary care doctor, the most intriguing session was labeled – “Recasting the Patient as Consumer”. I have major reservations that this is what patients really want. I have some skepticism on whether consumer driven health care can truly make care more affordable (here, here, here, and here). Was the current fad of pushing the onus of health squarely on the individual may be too simplistic? Panel members included: Ron Gutman, founder and CEO of HealthTap Bassam Kadry, Anesthesiologist and Participatory Medicine Advocate Ann Lamont, Managing Partner of […] Read More »
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