Let The Patient Define The Health Care Market

Imagine, if you will, a world in which arbitrary rules are placed on which cars you can purchase or what milk you can drink. Imagine that same world limiting your access to the Internet for certain purposes like, say, reading Consumer Reports. Imagine having regulations placed on the neighborhoods in which you can purchase a house, regardless of how much money you are ready to spend.

The inevitable question is "why the limits"? And the response is, well, "just because".

I have no doubt you would be outraged. You would immediately think that your freedoms and liberties were being trampled upon, and you wouldn't consider that acceptable at all.

But what happens when it comes to your health and health care?

We live in a country founded on the principles of a market economy. We live in a world of consumerism, of supply and demand, and of seeking the best value for your hard-earned dollar.

Consumers define most of our marketplace these days. They select products and services based on quality, value, accountability, customer service, and many other features.

But when a consumer enters the health care world, all goes awry. The principles I mentioned above? They get lost in the mix.

The disconnect occurs on three inter-related levels: access, quality, and cost.

Access to care is limited by arbitrary laws that limit a consumer's choices. In many aspects of care, a patient cannot simply choose the best clinician that provides the best quality of care and the best value. Why? Because there is a systemic disconnect. Costs are far from transparent in the marketplace, as are clinician reviews and outcomes. Access to care is limited by arbitrary and outdated legislative rules defining from whom a patient can or cannot receive care. There is a disconnect between the cost of service and the payer. Worse yet, the system as a whole has incentives that promote more care instead of less.

That world that I had you imagine earlier? That is what health care looks like now.

Health care is the only marketplace in this country that doesn't operate on the principles of a real market economy.  Patients – as consumers - have been given a bad deal in the process. Many agendas that were never in the best interests of the patient – such as legalized monopolies and conflicts of interest - became "acceptable". Health care has become decidedly non-consumer-driven and opaque. And it is not getting any better.

Fast forward to a world in which the patient makes the decisions - about access, about cost, about quality. Let the patient define value - just as they do in any other industry. Stop hovering over them in a paternalistic fashion reminiscent of the 1950's "father knows best" mentality and let the patient decide.

Don't worry: it won't create a system of greater and greater consumption. It will create a competitive marketplace, a health care world in which providers have to bring their best efforts to the table as patients will demand accountability. It has created stronger, more viable markets in a vast number of industries – so why not something as important as health care?

Let the patient decide, and watch what happens to health care.

Photo credits: awsheffield