June 25, 2017

“Hardly anyone gets paid when we are healthy”

Good friend and fellow Freelancers’ Show panelist Reuven Lerner sent in a fabulous article about pricing in the US healthcare system.

The following passage is a clear parallel to my typical “sell your head, not your hands” schtick:

Nearly all medical care (in the US) is paid on a fee-for-service basis, which means that medical providers make more money if they perform more procedures. This is perverse. We don’t want an excess of health-care services, especially unnecessary ones; we want health. But hardly anybody gets paid when we are healthy.

Sound familiar?

The US healthcare system is focused on labor, not outcomes.

Incentivized to do work, not produce results.

To sell their hands, not their heads.

Oops.

It’s a thought provoking article. Here’s the link:

A Bipartisan Way To Improve Medical Care

(Incidentally, I pay my primary care physician a fixed annual fee, ala the capitation model described in the article. It is hands down the best healthcare experience I have ever had. And by constrast, the HMO I suffered with in the 80s and 90s was by far the worst.)

Yours,

—J

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