Why “Patient Power”?
April 15th, 2008 | by admin |Because this is what government controls have taken away from us. It’s what we need to continue to benefit from life-saving medical advances and care, and be satisfied with our experience with physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies.
State and federal policies have wedged insurance companies between between you and your physician, which erodes the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors have more incentive to please insurance companies than they do to please you, the patient. Government controls have also placed your employer between you and medical insurance companies, so insurers seek to please employers, and not you.
Wait, hold on. In the above I pretty much plagiarized the late Milton Friedman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. In “How to Cure Health Care ,” he wrote:
Third-party payment has required the bureaucratization of medical care and, in the process, has changed the character of the relation between physicians (or other caregivers) and patients. A medical transaction is not simply between a caregiver and a patient; it has to be approved as “covered” by a bureaucrat and the appropriate payment authorized. The patient—the recipient of the medical care—has little or no incentive to be concerned about the cost since it’s somebody else’s money. The caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or, in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, of the government. The patient is no longer the one, and the only one, the caregiver has to serve. An inescapable result is that the interest of the patient is often in direct conflict with the interest of the caregiver’s ultimate employer. That has been manifest in public dissatisfaction with the increasingly impersonal character of medical care.
This Independence Institute blog will be a resource for Colorado policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens who want moral health care reform: toward a free-market in medicine. As Dr. Paul Hsieh of Sedalia wrote in a recent letter in the Rocky Mountain News :
free-market reforms are good because they respect an individual’s right to spend his own health-care dollar according to his judgment, for his own benefit. In contrast, false “reforms” (such as expanding Medicaid or imposing insurance mandates), merely raise costs, decrease access and force more people to become government dependents, as has happened in Tennessee and is happening in Massachusetts.Bureaucrats then decide how people’s health-care dollars may be spent, not the individual patients and doctors.
Dr. Hsieh blogs at Colorado’s Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM), founded last year by attorney Lin Zinser. The FIRM blog has publicized the work of the Independent Institute’s Linda Gorman, director of our Health Care Policy Center .
Her recent articles , along with those by Ari Armstrong and myself, offer a valuable critique of recent Colorado health care reform. If you’re a “greatest hits” type of reader, here’s my completely biased list of where to start:
- For a brief overview: Government Control is Bad for Your Health , a short article of mine published in the Rocky Mountain News. (I told you it’s a biased list.)
- For more depth, see Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care” , by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh.
- For much more depth, see The History of Health Care Costs and Health Insurance , by Linda Gorman.
