I took some notes while reading this eye opening book about or ongoing crisis with healthcare in America. the books is called, A Call To Action – Taking Back Healthcare for the future Generations. By Hank McKinnell Chairmen, CEO Pfizer Inc. It offers some unique insight into a system that needs to be overhauled. here's what he said:
We’ve never had a health care system in America. We have a system that focuses on sickness and its diagnosis, treatment and management.
Today in Health care we have it entirely backwards. We’re like a community that builds the best fire-fighting capability in the world but stops inspecting buildings or teaching kids about fire prevention. The best way to fight fires is to prevent them rather than fight them.
We need a coordinated healthcare system with an emphasis on education, prevention, and early intervention.
Without price consciousness on the part of the patient, doctors have no incentive to keep costs down or to innovate. No one has any sense of ownership in the system. The entire health care system is hijacked by the pretense that someone else is paying for it.
The more money that a company pays for employee health insurance, the less it can provide the employee in wages.
In the United States the industry average for health care benefits per employee is $7703.
Prices in Canada are lower than the US prices because the Canadian government caps the amount that the US pharmaceutical companies can charge Canadian pharmacies, distributors and wholesalers.
Not ALL drugs are cheaper in Canada. Generic drugs are actually priced far higher.
Competition is the mother of lower costs and better quality.
There is very little incentive for doctors to be responsive to patients. And because the bills go directly to an insurance company, there is very little incentive for anyone to care about costs.
It really boils down to who pays.
The element of control in our health represents another difference between health insurance and other forms of insurance. Healthcare costs are rising rapidly because we insist on treating healthcare events as the product of chance rather than what they are – predictable, inevitable and even intentional actions. (Smoking, obesity)
The medical system is a unique business model. The worse it treats you the more money it gets.
The first step is to rigorously collect the error data and publish it. If we require every hospital to publish the number of dropped babies, surgeries gone wrong, wrong doses, death from hospital-borne infections etc., I guarantee you that hospitals would shape up overnight.
The second step is to put healthcare professionals on notice that we will refuse to pay for preventable medical errors. You wouldn’t pay for a botched car repair, so why should you pay for a botched surgery?
Healthcare needs to be seen as an investment to be valued rather than as a cost to be avoided.
10 Calls to Action:
1. Take personal responsibility for your health
2. Transform employee Healthcare plans
3. Adopt specialized medical courts to replace the healthcare liability system.
4. Reform direct-to-consumer advertising
5. Build a level playing field for healthcare savings accounts
6. Use trade agreements to end “free-riding”
7. Maintain incentives for innovation
8. Demand electronic medical records
9. report on corporate citizenship
10. Initiate a Global Health Corps (similar to the World Health Organization )
Do you agree with him?
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