The next big movement in Massachusetts health care may come not from the state’s world-famous hospitals or its cutting-edge research labs, but from houses of worship.
Stepping up pressure on the health care industry to control spiraling costs, which are crimping family and government budgets, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization will host a forum next Tuesday at Temple Israel in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area to grill hospital and insurance leaders about the affordability of medical care.
Top executives of major hospital groups, such as Partners HealthCare System, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Steward Health Care System, and leading insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Tufts Health Plan, have accepted invitations to the event, which is scheduled for 7 to 9 p.m.
Gee, it is great that clergy finally want to be involved, but please don’t expect anything to happen by barking up the wrong tree.
In other words, the people who have created the bloated, distorted, monstrosity that is “healthcare” are not the ones to look to for solutions: the government, big hospitals, and big insurance.
There are many Christian groups going back to basic biblical principles to escape the un-holy trinity of Government, hospitals, and insurance. Those efforts are the true hope that Christian Clergy should be paying attention to.
True enough, but the cost is also influenced by the costs of research, including scientists’ salaries and travel expenses to and from foreign countries, and which also include expenses incurred in jungle research while searching for new plant species with medicinal qualities; not to mention other methods; the costs of which I am told can be high.
There are a lot of places that costs come from; the question is, what is the value delivered by all those efforts? Neither government, big hospitals, nor big insurance [the un-holy trinity] can answer that except through the lenses of their own self-interest.
Those answers can only come from the free market: where brutal competition allows the consumers of health care to vote with their dollars for THEIR own self interest. The providers who offer real value directed toward the self-interest of the consumer are the ones who will thrive. Those who don’t will disappear.
Free Markets work with computers, cell phones, internet, etc: it will work for the healthcare market also. If we let it; which we aren’t.
Fr. Warren,
One can live without a computer, a cell phone, even the internet, until the cost is such that one can afford it.
While you may be right that a purely market-based system will work better, I question whether one can treat health care as just another commodity. When one is already sick, one may not have the energy to shop around for the best service, even assuming you can identify the best.
Dear Jeremy, I would be a rich man if I had $1 for every person who has told me some variant on the theme “you can’t treat the healthcare market like cell phones, computers, hamburgers, etc.”
But no one gives me a solid argument for why not.
Even with the un-holy trinity exercising its near totalitarian grip on the healthcare industry, we see little sprouts of competition rising up to prove the un-holy trinity is only sustained by coercion and lobbying clout in DC and state capitals:
*Urgent care centers provide faster & cheaper emergency care than emergency rooms at hospitals
*Urgent care centers are now branching out to do physicals faster and cheaper than primary care physicians
*Internet based labs are doing blood, urine, and other tests for pennies on the dollar compared to hospital-based labs
*Pharmacies & Walmart are offering flu shots, pneumonia shots, etc for a third or less than your physician can.
*Internet sites provide competitive pricing information for patients to bargain with hospitals for procedures
The nature of competition is such that “shopping around” for the best service gets [i]easier[/i] with competition because the “bad actors” are weeded out by the brutal nature of the free market place. Thus, in a free market, your worst choice is probably going to be better for you than most choices you have in a highly controlled market that limits competition and has no mechanism for weeding out bad actors. Case in point, how many times have we read about “bad teachers” that never ever seem to get fired because the NEA and other union outfits prevent that.
Business and money flows to the best provider. If the un-holy trinity is truly the best there is for healthcare, then the free market is nothing for them to fear.
But of course they know that is not the case which is why the healthcare industry spends gobs of money on lobbying in Washington and the state capitals so they can make darn sure that free market forces are contained to the maximum extent possible.