Health care - a plan

This is going to be a long slog for people to read but this is one of the best and most intelligent health care plans that I have run across. Saves a lot of money and gives great (and affordable) care to everyone.

Some people are going to have their rice bowls taken away - lobbyists, hospital administrators (we have way to many high-paid administrators and too few actual Doctors), the drug sales representatives and those individuals who will not institute lifestyle changes (cutting carbohydrates for diabetics) and depend on everyone else to compensate for their inaction..

From Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker - Part One:

The Bill To Permanently Fix Health Care For All
Let's lay out the parameters for a bill, a fairly-modest update to my two previous missives on this point here and here (note the dates) and which can be easily turned into formal legislative language:

• • All providers must post, in their offices and on a public web site without any requirement to sign in or otherwise identify oneself to access it, a full and complete price list which shall apply to every person.  This instantly allows customers to compare pricing between providers for services and products in the medical realm.
  • All customers must be billed for actual charges at the same price on a direct basis at the time the service or product is rendered to them. This immediately and permanently decouples "insurance" from the provision of care.  The current system of an "explanation of benefits" that often features a "negotiated discount" of some 90% is nothing other than an extortion racket and is arguably felonious -- threatening to bankrupt someone if they don't buy your "insurance" through a threat to charge them ten times as much certainly appears to be a criminal enterprise and, given that more than one entity is involved, looks like it meets the definition of Racketeering.  Insurance coverage may well cover some, part or none of a given bill, and nothing prevents an insurer from telling you in advance of your visit how much they will pay (if anything) for a given procedure or drug.  Indeed you should demand that information from them and use it as part of choosing where to obtain treatment but the bill still has to be rendered to you, you have to be the one to file the claim and everyone must pay the same price to the same provider for the same kind and quantity of product or service.
  • For a bill to be valid and collectible it must be affirmatively consented to in writing, with a disclosure of the actual price to be charged from the above schedule for each item to be provided whether good or service, prior to the service being performed or the good furnished, subject only to the emergency exception below.  A bill that is increased, has items added to it after consent is obtained, which contains any open-ended promise to pay without an actual price listed for each service or good prior to customer consent or is issued with no consent at all (including having a customer sign a consent form while under the influence of drugs the facility gave them as occurs in virtually every instance today while you're being wheeled into the OR) is deemed fraudulent and void. This instantly stops "drive-by" doctor charges in hospitals as just one example.  It also prevents charging $20 for an aspirin; nobody would tolerate being billed by the square for toilet paper in a hotel!  Hospitals will of course squawk that they cannot operate like this as they "can't" figure out what is required until after-the-fact but that's false; nothing prevents them from advertising "Appendectomy: $2,000" and that being the soup-to-nuts price.  In fact that's exactly what the Surgery Center of Oklahoma does today so quite-clearly it both can and does work.  In addition this change will permanently and immediately put a stop to the ridiculous practice of defensive medicine (read below for the explanation.)  You would never accept a gas station that only displays the cost of your gasoline after you pumped it and varied that price based on who your car insurance was bought from or a grocery store that had no prices posted at all and only gave you a total after your groceries were taken out of the store and the transaction could not be refused.
  • No event caused by or a consequence of treatment can be billed to the customer.  This instantly aligns the interest of the customer in not having such an adverse complication (e.g. MRSA, etc) with the medical provider.  As it stands right now hospitals actually have an incentive for you to have a complication since they make more money if you do.  If you call me to fix your roof and I drop my ladder causing it to crash through your picture window I get to pay for the glass I broke through my ineptness.  The same must apply to medical providers. For those who claim hospitals and similar can't adopt such a model I point to the OKC surgery center, which does exactly this -- and has a lower complication rate (gee, I wonder why when they have to eat it if they cause it....)

Much more at the site - plan on spending 30 minutes reading through this and following the links.

And Part Two:

Implementation Of Permanent Health Reform

Again, these are two long and dense articles but they are incredibly well thought out and would be a shining beacon to other nations seeking to implement a national form of healthcare.