An Electronic Forum
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HealthPlanUSA |
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____________________ Cato
Institute |
Health
Care throughout the world has become a political football. Coverage that’s
"in" this year may be "out" next year, depending on
Congress, the minister of health, Parliament, the Bundestag and the Duma.
In most countries, the possibility of private practice, outside of the
seeing eyes of a government bureaucracy, extends to only 1/4 to 1/3 of the
citizens. Only in the United States is the major portion of the most
confidential matter relating to our bodies still out of the purview of the
social planners and our elected leaders who have no interest in us
personally, but only in our vote as balanced by the costs that we expend.
Unfortunately, this has made a dramatic change with the recent Health
Information Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which, under the
illusion of increasing privacy, has opened the medical file to the
government, insurance carriers, and the FBI.
It is unfortunate that in this "micro-chip" or computer era, which has brought about the greatest increase in wealth the world has ever seen, particularly in America where 7 percent of households have become millionaires , we haven’t extended cost-saving benefits (computers are so cheap they are available to virtually everyone) to the health care field. I have a patient that formerly worked on one of the first IBM Ramdac computers in the early 1960s. He tells me that in those days it was so large it required a room the size of a small gymnasium with major air conditioning to prevent overheating and a crew of about 20 technicians to keep it operating. He now has a Pentium computer that cost less than $500 with more memory, more power and more disk storage space than the IBM of 40 years ago which he thought cost the state about $5 million. It’s unfortunate that health care technology was not allowed to follow the same pattern, making it more available to all of us. My mother, who worked as a domestic before my father met her, always told us that we are fortunate that in this country we can count on wealthy people to employ the rest of us. Likewise, in America we can count on wealthy people and organizations to purchase $5 million dollar computers. This money from free enterprise enabled IBM and others to compete providing continued research and development for more efficient computers, which allowed us poorer folks to enjoy the benefits. Contrasting this with communist Russia, a state run economy, we find that their computers have less memory than the 1986 Intel 08088, but cost many times more. Thus, even these antiquated machines remained out of the reach of the masses. I am told by many of my friends in the technical areas of medicine that if free enterprise had been allowed to occur in medicine, a similar cost savings would have been realized. Instead of the cost of MRI machines going from $100,000s to $millions, it would have been reversed if large doctors’ groups had been allowed to purchase MRIs for their group’s own use rather than having to use the high cost centers of hospitals and diagnostic centers. Medicare prevented doctors from doing this since they saw it as self-serving rather than patient-serving. We still have not come to grips with this unusual hostility towards our profession. Meanwhile, this technology is still even more expensive in the rest of the world than in the United States. It is largely unavailable or severely restricted in government health plans, except through bureaucratic delays and hassles with long waiting periods. In the USA, only when my lung patients go to the emergency room of a hospital and mention in passing that they had a near syncopal episode, does the ER physician obtain a CT of the brain to make sure that there is no stroke or brain tumor present before they even call me about their lungs. An acquaintance in England, who had a massive stroke and was hospitalized in London, was not able to have his CT of the brain for a full three weeks, after which damage was so irreversible that nothing more could be done. Diagnostic technology is more available for secondary problems in the USA than for the primary medical problems in other countries. This electronic journal is an effort to preserve the best of private health care in this country and allow it to become affordable through less cost controls, which ultimately increase costs, and increased competition, and to get the governmental bureaucracy out of our intimate health care lives. To submit articles for consideration of publication in this HealthPlanUSANetwork electronic journal, posted to www.HealthPlanUSA.net, please email the document formatted in Word Perfect or Microsoft Word or HTML to DelMeyer@HealthPlanUSA.net. Articles that speak to the editorial objective of restoring the Medical MarketPlace will be considered in nearly any size, but articles from 500 to 2500 words will be preferred. A quarterly newsletter is published the first month of each quarter. To subscribe, please send an email to Subscribe@HealthPlanUSA.net. To submit articles that relate to the restoration of the Medical MarketPlace in the UK and EU, please submit the article to DelMeyer@HealthPlanUK.net. We are also interested in efforts to privatize and make health care more available and affordable throughout the world and would welcome any submissions on these subjects from any country. Physicians have traditionally met with their colleagues and the business and professional communities on Tuesday evenings. This came about because in any medical practice Monday and Friday are busy days and doctors alternated taking Wednesday and Thursday afternoons off to compensate for the night and weekend work that goes with any medical practice. This left Tuesday as the night for professional associations and networking. With the advent of government medicine, health maintenance organizations and other third party controls, these gatherings essentially disappeared. We re-established this MedicalTuesday network in April 2002, by providing all interested individuals and organizations a free biweekly newsletter regarding the many issues of health care in the US and globally. MedicalTuesday has also become the networking arm of HPUSA and HPUK. To review previous issues or register to receive these MedicalTuesday electronic newsletters, please go to www.MedicalTuesday.net or send an email to Subscribe@MedicalTuesday.net. To review editorials written during my four-year editorship of Sacramento Medicine; articles written during my ten-year service on their editorial board in "Hippocrates & His Kin,", "Voices of Medicine," and "Yesteryear in Sacramento Medicine" columns; articles written during my two-year service on the editorial board of California Physician; articles written for California Medicine; book reviews in Medical Sentinel and the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, where I serve on their editorial boards; and book reviews written for a number of journals including the St Croix Review, please go to www.HealthCareCom.net, an electronic HealthCare Communication Journal. To submit articles for consideration of publication in this electronic HealthCare Journal, please email the document formatted in Word Perfect or Microsoft Words or HTML to DelMeyer@HealthCareCom.net. Articles between 500 and 2500 words that are consistent with these editorial objectives of important issues in HealthCare will be considered for publication. For my professional/practice web page, see www.DelMeyer.net, where you will find more recent columns including a general interest MedInfo Health Lines, the Physician/Patient Bookshelf, and the professional Hippocrates Modern Colleagues series. Also included are details about my pulmonary practice and clinical research program. You can reach me at DelMeyer@DelMeyer.net. Please understand that the volume of email exceeds what I can respond to in a timely manner, but note that I will always include the information in these pages and journals, whose only purpose is to help patients throughout the world to obtain better and more cost effective health care. © Del Meyer, MD 1/2004 THIS WEB PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION |