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HEALTHPLANUSA.NET |
NEWSLETTER |
|
Community For Affordable HealthCare |
Vol IX, No 1, April, 2010 |
Utilizing the $1.8 Trillion Information Technology Industry
To
Transform the $2.4 Trillion HealthCare Industry into Affordable HealthCare
Through
innovation by moving from a vertical to a horizontal industry
In This Issue:
1. Featured Article:
Health Care: A Two-Decade Blunder
2. In the News:
Why government can't manage cost-effective health care
3. International HealthCare: Life-saving cancer drugs still not available in the NHS
4. Government
HealthCare: HIPAA Revisited
5. Lean
HealthCare: Personal Responsible Healthcare
6. Misdirection
in HealthCare: Reducing rather than increasing
spending and taxes
7. Overheard
on Capital Hill: Fuzzy Government
Accounting
8. Innovations
in HealthCare: Open markets will work efficiently when enabling conditions
exist
9. The Health Plan
for the USA: Health Plan USA
10. Restoring
Accountability in Medical Practice by Moving from a Vertical to a
Horizontal Industry
* * * * *
HealthPlanUSA
is upgrading its website. We have members in more than 30 states and 20 foreign
countries from six continents as near as we can estimate from the URL endings
of the email address list. We have a large contingency of members from Canada,
the UK and India, and we will have greater focus on these areas. Although
Canada has a law against private HealthPlans, many Canadians obtain their
health care from south of our border. We will be able to service more than half
of their population from the states bordering Canada since we are web based.
South Africa and South America, especially Chile, are increasing their interest
in our newsletters and our patient centric HealthPlan. Great things begin with
a small, focused plan. We think this will save personalized health care, not
only for the people of the United States, but also for the UK, India and other
countries that desire individual liberty. We are grateful for all of your interest.
At this time,
it has become imperative that we have more accurate demographics of our
membership. This is necessary to more accurately focus on the areas and
countries interested in our patient-oriented HealthPlan. For promotional and
informational purposes, we need accurate statistics measured by double-clicks.
To begin this process, we have instituted a registration program and will
charge a minimal fee for you to have full access to the archive portions of our
websites. This same fee will also allow you to enter all the HealthPlan sites,
whether HealthPlanUSA, HealthPlanUK, HealthPlanIndia or HealthPlanWorld, and others as
interest grows. These sites are under construction.
Our
patient-centric HealthPlans have the unique concept of not penalizing people
with illnesses, but rather surcharge those who participate in unhealthy living,
such as smoking, overeating, overdrinking or drug abuse, that then cause
high-cost disease and jeopardize most health plans. Maintenance costs of your
body are no more insurable than maintenance costs of your automobile or home.
Thus, we have an annual deductible that is equivalent to the average cost of
the yearly basic healthcare maintenance for your age. Current projections range
from $200 per year for someone in their twenties to perhaps $400 per year for
someone in their forties.
We also have
the unique concept of no restrictive panels of physicians, hospitals,
pharmacies, laboratories, x-ray or other diagnostic or treatment facilities.
These will be policed by the patients themselves. Patients in the open Medical
MarketPlace will automatically go to the most cost-effective physicians,
hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, x-ray or other diagnostic or treatment
facilities because all charges will be transparent and they can therefore
choose where to go. This is facilitated through a graded co-payment system for
every item, which makes every patient police their own expenses. This
eliminates most of the oversight costs of having doctor and nurse reviewers of
utilization costs for every office and on every hospital ward.
There is no
more important cost control than by the patients themselves. We have
demonstrated this with our clinical practice cost analysis studies. Satyam
Patel and I flew to Phoenix and spent an entire day with an actuary to review
this plan. He was actually dumbfounded at what he though was the ingenuity of
the plan. His initial actuarial projection was that HPUSA would realize a 30-40
percent savings in healthcare costs. Since then, our continued cost analysis
with real patients have shown up to a 60 percent cost savings on Emergency Room
visits and up to an 80 percent cost savings for annual physical exams. In both
of these instances, the patients are in a dialog with the physician on what is
really necessary. This results in unusual savings because the patient is in
charge with his medical counselor at his side advising what is appropriate for
the best cost-benefit ratio.
The PowerPoint
outline of www.HealthPlanUSA
is now available through our bookstore for you to download and study or peruse.
We have also
completed our startup cost projections. These are outlined in the Executive Summary of the HPUSA
Business Plan available for your review and study. Since these are
proprietary documents, we will require a Non Disclosure Agreement before being
able to download these products for your personal use. Like any Proprietary
Business Plan, it cannot be shared. But your associates will be able to acquire
one through the same mechanism that you use and this will allow you to share
proprietary business information with them. These cannot be returned for
refunds. As you will note from the cost projections, we will need true
freedom-loving, successful entrepreneurs to bring about the restoration of
private personal health care.
Welcome to an
exciting journey that will change health care in the first part of the 21st
century much the same way as the computer revolution of the latter 20th
century.
Please Note: We are sending
this also to our MedicalTuesday subscriber lists. If you subscribe to both
newsletters, we apologize for any duplication. We hope you feel the message is
important enough to warrant this one-time intrusion. To keep up, why not
subscribe to HPUSA.
* * * * *
1. Feature Article: Health Care: A
Two-Decade Blunder by
Commentary
Magazine: April 2010
In 1991 the political world was rocked
by the unlikeliest of victories. Harris Wofford, a former aide for John F.
Kennedy, upset two-term Republican Governor Richard Thornburgh in a special
election to fill the seat of the late Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz. Wofford
was guided to his victory by a little-known campaign manager named James Carville,
who told him to make a bold and unequivocal case for "universal health
care." Wofford's underdog victory left the GOP shell-shocked.
Fast-forward 19 years: it is the
Democrats who are now faced with divining the results of another underdog's
victory. In January, a little-known state senator named Scott Brown defeated
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley in a special election for the
United States Senate. Universal health care was once again on center stage.
This time around, though, the Republican seized on widespread antipathy to what
has come to be seen as an incoherent Democratic scheme for an unworkable
federal takeover of health care.
The unlikely victory not only defied
the odds of a Republican winning in Democrat-owned Massachusetts; Brown's
ascent also put him in the storied seat of the liberal lion Ted Kennedy. Before
Brown, no Massachusetts Republican had won a Senate election since Edward
Brooke in 1972; no Republican presidential candidate had secured
Massachusetts's electoral votes since Ronald Reagan in 1984; even more
striking, the Bay State had not sent any Republicans to the House of
Representatives since 1996. However, beyond the mere realization of an improbable
data point, this special election called into question much of the received
political wisdom of the past 20 years. Brown's victory directly contradicted
the liberal claims that Democrats own the health-care issue and that
comprehensive reform is popular. As a candidate, Brown ran on a platform
promising to serve as the health-care roadblock he instantly embodied on being
elected.
In fact, the Brown election can be
seen as the closing of the door on a two-decade era in which Democrats,
Republicans, and most of the political class came to believe that the Democrats
possessed an inherent electoral advantage on the health-care issue. The history
of the past 20 years reveals two Democratic presidencies, first Bill Clinton's
and now Barack Obama's, upended by health care, whereas a single
administration—that of a Republican, George W. Bush—benefited from it. In 2004,
Bush was able to secure a narrow re-election victory in part because of his
success in securing a form of targeted health-care reform through the creation
of a Medicare prescription-drug benefit.
The combination of Democratic wishful
thinking and an American electorate suspicious of the intentions of those
pushing relentlessly for an ever greater government involvement in health care
has proved a ballot-box disaster for Democrats. How did this happen? And why? .
. .
_____________
While health care was certainly an
important part of the Wofford win, it is not clear exactly how central its role
was. Interest in the race developed too late for pollsters to organize exit
polls, which would have better determined what motivated Pennsylvania's voters.
Nonetheless, the election instantly became part of political lore. For liberals
across America, it was a giant-killer moment in which health care was the
murder weapon. As Ted Kennedy put it, "Harris Wofford's dramatic victory
makes clear that the American people want comprehensive health care reform, and
they want it now."
Democrats entered into the 1992
election cycle with renewed optimism, eager to wield health care as an issue
once again. Carville ascended to a senior position in Bill Clinton's campaign
against the incumbent president. Like Thornburgh, the first President Bush had
once appeared unbeatable but had become undeniably vulnerable. Clinton, promising
an improved economy and a vaguely defined system for "universal
coverage," defeated Bush, with the anti-trade, anti-deficit Ross Perot
playing a major spoiling factor in a third-party candidacy that received nearly
20 percent of the vote. Clinton's "New American Health Care Plan,"
remarkably similar to the promises Barack Obama would make 16 years later,
sought:
To cover everybody. Control costs, improve quality, expand preventive and
long-term care. Maintain consumers' choice of doctors. Take on the insurance
companies and the medical bureaucracy, and demand reform.
Even so, polls showed that voters
ranked health care behind both the economy and the deficit in importance.
Nonetheless, Bill Clinton entered office believing that he had a mandate to overhaul
the nation's health-care system. The legislative conduct he backed in 1993 and
1994 should look eerily familiar to observers of the current debate: the
overwhelming moral certainty, the secret deliberations, the hardball tactics,
the question of whether to use the Senate reconciliation process to get around
rules giving that body's minority the power to block the legislation's forward
movement, the initial questions among Republicans of whether to get aboard a
moving train or stand against the proposals, and complaints from the Left about
the slowness of the process. At one point in 1994, the first lady, Hillary
Clinton, who was serving as head of the Task Force on National Health Care
Reform, gave a forceful speech to liberal activists in which she criticized
them for seeking "parochial victories," warning that "you'll end
up with no bill being passed—or a bill so weak the president will veto
it."
And as is true about the Obama plan,
the more the public learned about the Clinton health-care reform and its cost
(for the nation and for themselves), the less they liked it. According to
Harvard polling expert Robert Blendon, support for the Clinton plan fell from
70 percent to 43 percent over the course of a year. As public support dropped,
Republican flirtations with reform, especially among liberal Republican
senators like John Chafee and Bob Packwood, diminished, and opposition
hardened. Furthermore, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole, with an eye on the
1996 presidential nomination and recognizing that his perceived openness to a
bipartisan compromise weakened his own shot at the nomination, became a staunch
critic. . .
In 1994, up for re-election, Senator
Harris Wofford served as a bellwether once again, but of a different kind.
Having once foreshadowed Clinton's win, Wofford now served as a leading
indicator of Clinton's political weakness. Katharine Seelye wrote in the New
York Times that Wofford was so weighed down by Clinton and his health-care
plan that his staffers "prepared a four-page, single-spaced list of
‘significant Wofford/Clinton policy differences'?" Wofford failed in his
1994 re-election bid, as Democrats lost a total of eight Senate seats and 54
House members. . .
Attempts by politicians on either side
to upset this balance are likely to generate accusations of
"privatization" from the Left or charges of "creeping
socialism" from the Right. Bush's more targeted approach kept him from
affecting the balance, but it also limited the scope of his ability to improve
the system.
_____________
It appeared to Barack Obama and
his dramatic majorities in the House and Senate that the balance was ready to
be upset in 2009. Ted Kennedy had been championing a nationally managed
universal system since the late 1960s, and the Senate Health, Education, Labor
and Pensions (HELP) committee, long chaired by Senator Kennedy, had designed
the Senate's legislation in the spring. The bill was then sent to the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for an independent assessment of its cost.
The CBO quickly determined that the Kennedy bill would cost $1.3 trillion over
10 years and would cover only 16 million people. At a time when President Obama
was bemoaning the problem of 46 million uninsured people in America, the news
that $1.3 trillion would cover only one-third of them seemed like a lousy deal.
The American people, who had been understandably tempted by the siren call of
Obama's cry for a health-care overhaul that would somehow cover a huge number
of the uninsured while simultaneously reducing costs, began to have second
thoughts. This skepticism was exacerbated by the continuing financial meltdown,
which reminded Americans that perhaps we could not afford to have it all.
The CBO produced many more health-care
scores of different proposals throughout 2009. Price tags were similarly
gasp-inducing, and none of its findings mitigated the initial and accurate
impression that the taxpayer would be spending in the range of a trillion
dollars for the various plans, which would require the majority of Americans to
be contributors to, rather than recipients of, government largesse. . . .
As this was happening, Scott Brown
traversed the state and pounded his opponent, Massachusetts Attorney General
Martha Coakley, on her support for the Democratic health-care proposals. Brown
insisted that he would be the "41st vote" against the Senate's
attempts to reconcile its bill with that of the House, going so far as to say
that he was "the only person who can stop the debate on this monstrosity
of a health-care bill and make them go back to the drawing board." His
opposition resonated with voters far more than Coakley's promise to be a
reliable vote in favor of the bill.
Just as the Wofford win revealed a
decline in popularity for George H. W. Bush in 1991, the Brown win revealed a
decline in Obama's, with consequences yet to be determined.
_____________
To be sure, our
health-care system is flawed: the U.S. spends far too much and gets too little,
and far too many people lack coverage or are concerned about the expense or the
long-term inability to secure coverage. Despite the fact that America's
doctors, nurses, and medical innovators are the finest in the world, our
delivery and allocation systems are defective, leading to an inefficient and
expensive distribution of care. Our current spending patterns are
unsustainable, and both Medicare and Medicaid are headed toward insolvency.
Recognition of the problem and agreement with President Obama's approach are
vastly different things, but the existence of a crisis is beyond dispute.
Without a clear and cohesive way
forward, the American people seem willing to live with the current, inefficient
arrangement, in which most people are in the private market, while the poor,
disabled, and elderly get Medicaid and Medicare. One lesson of the Brown
election is that attempts to push too far in any one direction will likely
generate a voter counterattack. Anyone who wants to change the system will have
to get bipartisan cover in order to make real changes. . . .
Unfortunately, while the Brown
election has upset Obama's plans in the short term, it has not caused the
Democratic leadership in Congress and the White House to question whether they
are right on either the merits or the politics of the health-care issue. The
merits can be debated endlessly, but this review of the past two decades
indicates the foolhardiness of Democratic certainty regarding health care's
political advantages. Not only do Republicans have the ability to play in the
health-care arena, but the recent debates have also further diminished the
American people's faith in the Democrats, both on the issue itself and on the
larger question of profligate government spending.
As we get deeper into 2010, Barack
Obama seems reluctant to unburden himself of what must be an exasperating
dilemma for a politician so given to lengthy address: his explications have
only served to make Americans more mistrustful of a dysfunctional health-care
takeover. Indeed, two decades of debate have delivered a strangely elusive
verdict: the promise of a comprehensive health-care overhaul is not a winning
tactic for Democrats. Nor, for that matter, could it ever be one for
Republicans. All we do know is that discrete measures, ones that hone in on
this or that flaw in the health-care system, have the inestimable value of
being widely palatable—and, not incidentally, achievable.
Tevi Troy is a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and was deputy
secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2007 to
2009.
Julius Krein assisted with the research for this article.
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* * * * *
2. In the News: Why government can't manage cost-effective health care
By Jim Sanders, Sacramento Bee, jsanders@sacbee.com
Tuesday, Mar. 16, 2010 | Page 1A
New
Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez
handed out pay increases
or promotions totaling nearly $132,000 per year the day he was sworn in this
month, including a $65,000 raise to his chief of staff.
Of eight staff members targeted, Sara I. Ramirez received
by far the largest raise, jumping her pay from $125,256 to $190,008 for serving
as Pérez's top assistant, according to documents obtained under state
open-records law.
Ramirez will be paid $80,204 more per year
than her boss or Senate
President Pro Tem Darrell
Steinberg, whose pay was cut from $133,639 to $109,584 last year by the
state's independent salary-setting commission.
Ramirez's salary will equal that of her
predecessor, Nolice Edwards,
who retained her $190,008 annual salary after her boss, Karen Bass, relinquished the
gavel to Pérez.
By comparison, lawmakers who are not in
leadership positions make $95,291, plus about $142 in per diem while the Legislature is in session. . .
The new pay increases come as the state is
reeling from recession, however, with thrice-monthly furloughs imposed on most
state workers and the state facing a projected budget deficit of up to $20
billion through June 2011.
Lew Uhler, president of the National Tax
Limitation Committee, called the raises a case of "tin ear" in which
lawmakers are ignoring the pain of voters who are straining to keep jobs and
homes. . . .
Political analyst Tony Quinn agreed, noting that the Legislature's
public approval rating had fallen to 16 percent in a recent Field Poll. . .
They
obviously cannot manage any government costs or expenditures.
Read more: www.sacbee.com/2010/03/16/2609675/california-assembly-speaker-oks.html#ixzz0iP47ehpy
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* * * * *
3. International HealthCare: Life-saving cancer drugs are still not available in the
NHS
By Rosa Prince, Political
Correspondent, Published: 03 Apr 2010, Telegraph.co.uk
In November 2008, amid
public outcry at the failure of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence
(NICE) to approve drugs on cost grounds, Alan Johnson, the then-health
secretary, promised more medicines would be made available.
He set a new ceiling of
Ł80,000 – compared to the previous limit of Ł48,000 – for treatments which
could extend good quality of life for more than a few months.
"Patients and the
public can be confident that from today there will be greater clarity, greater
fairness and, most importantly, greater access to a wider range of drugs,"
Mr Johnson said.
Since then however,
research by the Conservatives shows that not a single new drug has been fully
approved by NICE.
The Tories also claimed
that there had been a substantial decline in the number of medicines for all
conditions approved for use by NHS patients in recent years.
In 2000, no new drugs
were refused compared to 29 per cent in 2009.
Many cancer medicines
which are widely available in Europe, such as the bowel cancer drug,
Bevacizumab, and the kidney cancer drug, Sorafenib, are not available in the
United Kingdom. . .
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Government medicine does not give timely access to
sophisticated cancer therapy.
* * * * *
4. Government
HealthCare: HIPAA Revisited
I learned about the lack
of health privacy when I hung out my shingle as a psychiatrist. Patients asked
if I could keep their records private if they paid for care themselves. They
had lost jobs or reputations because what they said in the doctor's office
didn't always stay in the doctor's office. That was 35 years ago, in the age of
paper. In today's digital world the problem has only grown worse.
A patient's sensitive
information should not be shared without his consent. But this is not the case
now, as the country moves toward a system of electronic medical records.
In 2002, under President
George W. Bush, the right of a patient to control his most sensitive personal
data—from prescriptions to DNA—was eliminated by federal regulators
implementing the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act. Those
privacy notices you sign in doctors' offices do not actually give you any
control over your personal data; they merely describe how the data will be used
and disclosed.
In a January 2009 speech,
President Barack Obama said that his administration wants every American to
have an electronic health record by 2014, and last year's stimulus bill
allocated over $36 billion to build electronic record systems. Meanwhile, the
Senate health-care bill just approved by the House of Representatives on Sunday
requires certain kinds of research and reporting to be done using electronic
health records. Electronic records, Mr. Obama said in his 2009 speech,
"will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat
expensive medical tests [and] save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable
medical errors that pervade our health-care system."
But electronic medical
records won't accomplish any of these goals if patients fear sharing
information with doctors because they know it isn't private. When patients
realize they can't control who sees their electronic health records, they will
be far less likely to tell their doctors about drinking problems, feelings of
depression, sexual problems, or exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. In
2005, a California Healthcare Foundation poll found that one in eight Americans
avoided seeing a regular doctor, asked a doctor to alter a diagnosis, paid privately
for a test, or avoided tests altogether due to privacy concerns.
Today our lab test
results are disclosed to insurance companies before we even know the results.
Prescriptions are data-mined by pharmacies, pharmaceutical technology vendors,
hospitals and are sold to insurers, drug companies, employers and others
willing to pay for the information to use in making decisions about you, your
job or your treatments, or for research. Self-insured employers can access
employees' entire health records, including medications. And in the past five
years, according to the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 45
million electronic health records were either lost, stolen by insiders
(hospital or government-agency employees, health IT vendors, etc.), or hacked
from outside.
Electronic record systems
that don't put patients in control of data or have inadequate security create
huge opportunities for the theft, misuse and sale of personal health
information. The public is aware of these problems. A 2009 poll conducted for
National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of
Public Health asked if people were confident their medical records would remain
confidential if they were stored electronically and could be shared online. Fifty
nine percent responded they were not confident.
The privacy of an
electronic health record cannot be restored once the contents are sold or
otherwise disclosed. Every person and family is only one expensive diagnosis,
one prescription, or one lab test away from generations of discrimination. .
.
Some argue that consent
and privacy controls are impractical or prohibitively costly. But consent is
ubiquitous in health care. Ask any physician if she would operate on a patient
without informed consent.
There is no need to choose between the benefits of technology and our
rights to health privacy. Technologies already exist that enable each person to
choose what information he is willing to share and what must remain private.
Consent must be built into electronic systems up front so we can each choose
the levels of privacy and sharing we prefer. . .
Privacy has been
essential to the ethical practice of medicine since the time of Hippocrates in
fifth century B.C. The success of health-care reform and electronic record
systems requires the same foundation of informed consent patients have always
had with paper records systems. But if we squander billions on a health-care
system no one trusts, millions will seek treatment outside the system or not at
all. The resulting data, filled with errors and omissions, will be worth less
than the paper it isn't written on.
Dr. Peel, a psychiatrist
in private practice, is the founder of Patient Privacy Rights
(www.patientprivacyrights.org)
and leads the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy.
Printed in The Wall
Street Journal,March 24, 2010, page A17
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Government is not the solution
to our problems, government is the problem.
- Ronald Reagan
* * * * *
5. Lean HealthCare: Personal responsible health care
Lean health care has had increasing
emphases in recent years. There have been both government and private
initiatives expounding this concept. However, the two groups are trying to
implement lean health care by going in opposite directions. The government
fiats to reduce cost have not reduced cost but in each instance have increased
cost. Medicare predictions of costs at inception in 1965 for 1990 have
increased about 800 percent faster than expected. The same can be said for the
cost of Medicaid over the same 25 years. These projections, however, pale to
the prediction of the more than $1 trillion additional cost that the Obama
plans will produce. With the additional 25 million Americans that will be
placed in Medicaid and the many current Medicaid recipients feeling they don't
have access, will we become like Canadian Medicare, where their Supreme Court
ruled that Canadian Medicare does not give access to care but only access to a
waiting list? Others are concerned about whether the same 800 percent increase
in Medicare spending above predictions during its first 25 years will be
replicated with Obama care. Are we really going to experience a catastrophic $8
trillion entitlement instead of a $1 trillion entitlement?
Physicians see examples of both on a
frequent basis. That is why they see the other side of the coin from what nurses,
teachers and other unionized workers experience. These are the professionals
that we have to win over for the overall success of Lean HealthCare and the
teaching of the economics of health care in our schools.
Many of our readers have written
that they don't believe that a significant co-payment reduces healthcare costs
by 30-40 percent. However, we have shown examples frequently in our Medical Gluttony column
in MedicalTuesday on
alternate Tuesdays for the past eight years.
Lean HealthCare can be
demonstrated by the patient with a 20 percent co-payment, like Medicare was
initially designed to do and pure Medicare without co-insurance still does. It
will reduce emergency room costs up to two-thirds in our experience. We see ER
cardiac evaluations frequently in the $9,000 range before discharge home. Patients
with a 20 percent co-payment, for instance, usually stop the medical testing at
about $3,000 when the ER doctor can assure them that they haven't had a heart
attack. This is a two-thirds reduction in cost simply with a 20 percent
co-payment, like the original Medicare but without any Medicare oversight or
controls. Medicare with MediGap-insurance to make the co-payments does not have
any patients interested in controls and thus has no limits and must depend on
the Medicare police to reduce hospital costs through denial of care.
Similarly, patients admitted to
the hospital with a 10 percent hospital co-payment policy ($200 per day on a
$2,000 daily hospital cost) will reduce their days in the hospital by an
average of two days on a six-day admission. This is a savings of $4000 dollars
per $12,000 admission resulting from an $800 total co-payment, ($200 x 4 days)
or 33 percent savings of hospital costs without any loss of quality. Not only
is there a hospital cost savings of 33 percent ($12,000 for six days vs $8,000
for four days) but the patient also saves 33 percent ($1200 co-payment for six
days vs $800 co-payment for four days) because he wants to get out as soon as
medically possible- ASAMP.
Similar savings will also occur
in lean outpatient medicine. A patient going to an internist for his annual
exam for $150 will want to have his laboratory work done (basic chemistries,
lipids, blood counts ($375), chest x-rays ($150), ECG ($125) for $650 and
demand this every year on an ineffective $20 co-payment. However, if the
patient is responsible for 30 percent of his outpatient annual examination
costs of $800 (150 + 375 + 150 + 125) or $240, he will begin having a two-way
discussion with his physician immediately, rather than after the insurance
company has adjudicated the reimbursement, which is too late and time
consuming. He will understand that since his lipids were normal last year, he
really doesn't need to recheck them for five years. Since his chest x-ray and
ECG were normal last year does he really need them this year? In fact, the
patient will ask if any testing is really necessary this year at all except for
the doctor's physical examination (the laying on of hands) and will forgo all
the expensive testing of $650 and will only be liable for the 30 percent of the
physician's time or $45. (30% of $150) He has saved $650 of healthcare costs
and even reduced his 30 percent co-payment from $240 to $45, nearly $200. The
patient has saved 80 percent of the cost of his annual examination by being
responsible for 30 percent of outpatient medicine.
In these illustrations, the
patient saved 66 percent in the ER example, 33 percent in the hospital example
and 80 percent in the office example. This gives you the concept of how
HealthPlanUSA, if brought to fruition, will save between 33 to 80 percent of
healthcare costs by putting the patient in charge in consultation with his
physician. That is why the actuaries' initial estimate of a 30 to 40 percent
healthcare savings has been projected upwards to 40 to 50 percent average
savings in costs. Government alternatives have never saved costs - they only
increase the costs. The future of Lean HealthCare must rest with the
free-market based concept.
This plan would save the entire
$1.2 trillion cost of the Obama Government Health Care Plan, save taxes and not
enslave our children and grandchildren with obscene deficits. Government health
care will always produce gluttonous increases in cost with further secondary
restrictions required by the cost overruns that it caused, reducing the quality
of health care we have come to expect in America.
We are projecting that
HealthPlanUSA will institute such Lean HealthCare that will solve our
healthcare problems without any oversight before the full Obama plan can be
implemented over the next three or four years.
We are looking for supporters and
investors who would like to participate in such a plan, information technology
experts who would like to help develop the platform for such a plan, executives
who would like to administrate and oversee such a plan, a health insurance
company that wants to be a HPUSA BCBS, and a finance company that would like to
issue the HPUSA Insurance/Health CreditCard. The challenge is huge - not only
for health care, but also for the freedom for which our fathers and
grandfathers gave their lives to provide us with the American opportunity.
Let's not lose it.
For those with a serious
interest, please proceed to our bookstore, purchase and
download the PowerPoint
Presentation. Review and study it. You may then proceed with purchasing and
downloading the Executive
Summary of this plan. If you are interested in being part of an historic,
disruptive and innovative health plan that is patient centric, email or send us your CV,
Credentials, Experience or Resume and a short letter on how you would see
yourself participating in such a plan.
This opportunity, given our
position in history at this time, is truly mind boggling, huge, demanding and
beyond the reach of the ordinary. But so did people think of Larry Page and
Sergey Erin prior to Sept 7, 1998 when they launched GOOGLE from a friend's
garage. They went public in August 2004. Or of William Hewlett and David
Packard, launching HP from Packard's garage in 1939 during the depression with
$538, incorporated in 1947 and went public in 1957. They are now one of the world's largest
information technology companies, larger than IBM or Microsoft, and they
operate in nearly every country of the world.
Health care will be bigger than
both. Are you up to joining the winning team?
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The Future of HealthCare Has to Be Lean,
Efficient and Personal.
However, the FUTURE is NOW!
* * * * *
6. Misdirection in HealthCare: Reducing rather than
increasing spending and taxes
Reader's
Digest had a poll some time ago. What was truly amazing was that the rich and
the poor agreed that no one should have to pay more than one-fourth of their
earnings in taxes. The following proposal does not quite get us down to that
level, but it would be a good start for our country. It would be especially
good for implementing personal and private health care.
The
financial crisis in this country is causing local and state governments to
scale back. Only the federal government is spending more money because they
have the ability to print money, which unfortunately then loses value every
time they roll the printing presses. The root cause of the crises is the
graduated income tax authorized by the 16th Amendment, which has no
limits on taxes. So Congress has the SPEND MORE and then TAX MORE philosophy!
What
this country needs before we can have any control of our finances, whether it's
our healthcare or welfare costs, is a tax limitation amendment. The previous 16th
Income Tax Amendment was passed in the days when people understood one could
not spend more than one makes. This unlimited income tax on individuals and a
duplicate tax on corporations, also owned by individuals, place no limits on
Congress. Not only do they feel free to spend our money, but also the money of
our children and grandchildren, because of the ease in raising the income and
other innovative taxes. All of these come out of one pocket - the taxpaying
citizens.
A
sailor’s letter to the editor summed it up rather succinctly. I object and take
exception to every saying that Obama and the Congress are spending money like a
drunken sailor. As a former drunken sailor, I quit when I ran out of money.
It
should be apparent that in these times of reduced income, the government should
have reduced its outlays. The social security tax should have been indexed
since inception in the 1930s when America's average life expectancy was 62,
rising to the current life expectancy of 75. Our country cannot afford to have
individuals live on Social Security benefits an extra 10 to 15 years when most
of us are capable of working and earning our own keep. Most physicians now work
past age 75 and some into their 80s and 90s. If you check the obituary columns,
one finds a high percentage of people who lived into their ninth and tenth
decade of life and worked into their eighth decade, some into their ninth. An
initial attempt to index Social Security increased the Social Security
retirement age to 67. It should have included a proposal to index the benefits
gradually to the present average life expectance of 75.
Medicare
is in a negative cash flow and is scheduled to go broke in the next decade. The
Medicare age should also be immediately indexed to age 67 and gradually further
indexed to match the Social Security indexing schedule. Only someone with a
paretic brain could even think of lowering the Social Security and Medicare
ages to 55. That would be total fiscal irresponsibility, meaning economic
collapse for the United States, with possible loss of the world's highest
credit rating.
By
Constitutional Amendment, the 16th Amendment should be revised to
limit all taxes. The three levels of government, federal, state and local or
county, should each be limited in the number and the size of the taxes they can
implement. The federal government should be limited to the following two taxes:
a maximum income tax of 15 percent on the citizens and an excise tax limited to
10 percent on interstate commerce and imports. The state government should be
limited to a 5 percent income tax on its residents and a 5 percent sales tax on
items purchased in the state. The local government should be limited to a one
percent tax on property held within the state and a one percent sales tax on
items purchased in the county. No other taxes would be allowed. The property
assessment should not increase more than two percent maximum for inflation per
year to prevent citizens from losing their homes as they get older due to
increasing property values and diminishing incomes. There should not be a
corporate income tax since corporations are owned by the citizens and double
taxation should not be allowed. There should never be a tax or surtax on any
tax.
The
citizens of our country could then manage their own health care with stability
and protection from the government, which has confiscated their income in
increasing fashion from year to year.
They
could manage their own retirement also. But that is a subject for another day.
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Well-Meaning
Regulations Restrict and Worsen Quality of Care.
* * * * *
7. Overheard on Capital Hill: Fuzzy Government Accounting
The U.S.
Federal Government is rather adept at using "fuzzy math". Whether it
be claiming jobs were created (when they were not), or
grossly, grossly underestimate the cost of healthcare plans,
government math seems to exist on a plane of existence where the normal rules
of mathematics just don't apply.
Remember Medicare 1990 Estimates?
As the Administration is
attempting to downplay the cost of a government takeover of healthcare, it is
worth reminding ourselves of just how good the government actually is at
estimating future costs.
The Denver post today provides a good
illustration:
Remember that Congress estimated Medicare's cost at $12 billion for 1990
(adjusted for inflation) when the program kicked off in 1965. Medicare cost
$107 billion in 1990 and is quickly approaching $500 billion."
Does anyone seriously
think the same won't happen this time with ObamaCare?
Peter Robinson (WSJ) interview with Gary
Becker, Nobel Laureate March
26, 2010:
I begin with the obvious question. "The health-care legislation? It's
a bad bill," Mr. Becker replies. "Health care in the United States is
pretty good, but it does have a number of weaknesses. This bill doesn't address
them. It adds taxation and regulation. It's going to increase health costs—not
contain them."
Drafting a
good bill would have been easy, he continues. Health savings accounts could
have been expanded. Consumers could have been permitted to purchase insurance
across state lines, which would have increased competition among insurers. The
tax deductibility of health-care spending could have been extended from
employers to individuals, giving the same tax treatment to all consumers. And
incentives could have been put in place to prompt consumers to pay a larger
portion of their health-care costs out of their own pockets.
"Here in
the United States," Mr. Becker says, "we spend about 17% of our GDP
on health care, but out-of-pocket expenses make up only about 12% of total
health-care spending. In Switzerland, where they spend only 11% of GDP on
health care, their out-of-pocket expenses equal about 31% of total spending.
The difference between 12% and 31% is huge. Once people begin spending
substantial sums from their own pockets, they become willing to shop around.
Ordinary market incentives begin to operate. A good bill would have encouraged
that."
Trend
Macrolytics' Chief Investment Officer Donald Luskin, in a note to clients, March 26,
2010:
For all the anti-growth implications in Sunday
night's passage of Obamacare, it seems strange at first blush that markets
pretty much haven't reacted at all. But why should they have? . . . And from
the perspective of new recovery highs in stocks, we would say markets have
reacted by expressing their satisfaction that it took a whole year. However
distasteful the smoky-room processes that were ultimately required to achieve
enactment, far worse would have been the legislative blitzkrieg that seemed
inevitable a year ago. . . . Obamacare's enactment took so long, became in the
end so unpopular, and required such unseemly procedural ploys, that the road
has now been definitively paved for even slower policy processes in the future,
thanks to the increasingly likelihood that Republicans will take control of one
or both houses of Congress in November.
H.R. 4872, the
"Reconciliation Act of 2010" which the Senate passed this afternoon.
This
legislation takes the flawed healthcare bill which President Obama signed into
law on Tuesday and makes it worse. It adds on a net $53 billion in
further tax increases, including:
These new tax hikes come at a time of 10 percent unemployment, and
trillions of dollars in looming tax increases already on the horizon.
It's the last thing taxpayers need after a very tough weekend of bad news.
Hoover
Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson writing . . . at www.Pajamasmedia.com:
President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the
health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a
moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not
now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or
Medical, a basic medical plan. . . .
No, instead,
the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring
tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments
with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we "are leveling the
playing field" and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law. . . .
[W]e are in revolutionary times in which the government
will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans, while abroad
we are a revolutionary sort of power, eager to mend fences with Syria and Iran,
more eager still to distance ourselves from old Western allies like Israel and
Britain.
There won't be any more soaring rhetoric from Obama about
purple-state America, "reaching across the aisle," or healing our
wounds. That was so 2008. Instead, we are in the most partisan age since
Vietnam, ushered into it by the self-acclaimed "non-partisan."
Backroom Deals In the Democrats Healthcare
Takeover
Cornhusker Kickback: Perhaps the most well known in the Senate
bill, the provision, included at
the behest of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE),
ensures that Nebraska would be the only state to have the
full amount of
its increased Medicaid costs paid for by the federal government.
The Louisiana Purchase: The Senate bill provides extra Medicaid
funding for any state in which
every county has been declared a disaster
area. Because of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana is the only
state that would qualify for the money.
The $300 million provision for Louisiana was slipped in late
in the process
to persuade Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) to support the health care takeover.
Gator Aid: At the request of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fl),
the Senate bill includes a formula for
protecting certain Medicare Advantage
enrollees from billions in cuts. The formula would only apply
to five states, most notably to Florida in
which 800,000 of the state's one million Medicare
Advantage users
would be exempt from cuts.
New England Handouts: In addition to the $100 million included
in federal Medicaid payments
for Nebraska, the bill provides two New
England states with even more money Medicaid funding.
According to CBO, the Senate bill now
contains about $600 million in extra Medicaid cash to
Vermont, and about $500 million in
additional money for Medicaid to Massachusetts, making these
three states the only to receive such
funding. Despite claims that these cushy extras for a few states
would be scaled back, reports indicate
that the White House is still making deals so these states can
keep the
handouts.
The Dodd Clinic: Section 10502(a) of the bill provides $100
million for construction at an
unnamed "health care facility"
affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university
in a state with only one public academic
medical and dental school. Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT)
later sent a press release saying that he
was securing the money for the University of Connecticut,
and then Dodd bragged that, "These
provisions will bring millions of dollars to the state so that
Connecticut's
residents can receive quality, affordable health care."
Montana Medicare Earmark: A provision slipped into the Senate bill
by Finance Committee
Chair Max Baucus (D-MT), Section
1881A(b)(2), specifically expands Medicare coverage for
individuals who reside "in or around
the geographic area subject to an emergency declaration made
as of June 17, 2009." The area the
bill refers to is an asbestos contaminated area near Libby,
Montana, for which Sen. Max Baucus has been trying to secure
funding for years.
California Democrats: Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa changed
their votes from no to yes. Coincidently, just yesterday, The Dept of Interior
announced water would again flow to their districts after restricting water to
the region and causing high unemployment. Retiring Tenn. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn)
congressman changed his vote from a no to a yes after being offered the job of
NASA administrator.
To
read more than 200 OpEds on ObamaCare . . .
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What is Congress Really Doing?
* * * * *
8. Innovations in
HealthCare: Open markets will
work efficiently when enabling conditions exist
The decentralization that follows
centralization is only beginning in health care. - Christensen
The
World Health Care Congress has just concluded its annual meeting. This year's
meeting was highlighted by Dr Clayton Christensen and Dr. John Kenagy. Both
spoke on how disruption and innovation work together. This newsletter has
pointed out the need for an open market in Health Care for the entire eight
years we've existed. We now understand why some of those that communicate with
us don't think that open markets will work in health care. They don't
understand open markets.
Dr.
Christensen pointed out that open markets won't work because enabling
conditions don't exist at this time in health care. Open markets require the
"visible hand" of systemic, integrative management, so that
• Value created can be measured and known
• Price reflects value
• Those who create value can
capture it.
Open
markets will then work efficiently when these enabling conditions exist.
However, we are currently in a period of centralization in health care. This is
not a period to lose hope. The decentralization that follows centralization is
only beginning in health care. Electronic medical records cannot be pushed into
use. "They will simply sit unused on a disk drive, rather than in a paper
file. Doctors will pull EMRs into use when applications are developed that help
doctors get jobs done that they are trying to do."
The
healthcare revolution may be similar to the computer revolution of the 1980s.
When the mainframe computer companies were having difficulty, President Reagan
did not bail out the mainframe workers as the United Auto Workers were bailed
out at a cost of $150,000 for each vote anticipated in the next election.
Burroughs and others are no longer in existence. This gave the impetus to the
Personal Computer Revolution and, in a decade or two, the price went from $5
million for each mainframe to $500 for a Pentium V. If the current auto
industry had been treated in a similar fashion, some would have gone under
while others, such as Ford who took no taxpayers funds, are expanding.
Americans have an aversion to buying cars from government (GM-Government
Motors). We will be seeing a large switch to Ford products. Meanwhile, electric
cars are on the horizon and becoming more common. Batteries now exist that will
accommodate 100 miles of travel before recharging. That would allow traveling
from Sacramento to San Francisco or to Lake Tahoe. China is working on
developing car batteries that will soon accommodate 200 miles of travel. That
will allow for roundtrips for the same distance. Within a decade or two, just
like the personal computer, every family would have one electric car and only
one internal combustion engine car, cutting our need for Arab oil in half and
essentially eliminating any pollution problems. This would have happened with a
president who understands disruptive revolutions rather than one just trying to
maintain the status quo.
The
hospitals received favorable treatment from the recent Health and Taxation
bill. This is just prolonging the period of time before the decentralization of
the healthcare industry can occur.
As
Clayton Christensen, PhD, stated at the World Health Care Congress,
The Traditional General
Hospital Is Not a Viable Business Model.
John Kenagy, MD, MPA, ScD, FACS, stated it somewhat differently:
The Traditional General Hospital Is Not an Adaptive Business Model.
At
this period of time in medical history, more than three-fourths of operations
no longer require a hospital and can be done safely in a free-standing surgery
center. Surgery is only one-tenth of
the practice of medicine. More than 90 percent of the practice of internal
medicine and all of its subspecialties occurs in the private physician's
offices and diagnostic centers. Only about 10 percent of the practice of
medicine, such as heart attacks, strokes, and the critically ill require a
hospital. The hospitals will have to adapt and redefine themselves much as IBM
did. They did not go the way of Burroughs and others but joined the computer
revolution, manufacturing PCs as they reformatted their large mainframes that
are now so essential in the vast worldwide network of users, where millions
need simultaneous access to the same or similar data.
We
have returned from the World Health Care Congress, the premier event in its
field, with more than 100 power point lectures. We will review those that we
heard presented and sample some of the other simultaneous ten tracks for more
interesting presentations. They will be reported on during the coming months. These
are interesting times in medicine and will be increasingly disruptive and
innovative. There won't be much that government or the mainframe hospitals can
do about it. We hope the hospitals will adapt much as IBM and the mainframes
did in the 1980s, when the world was transformed to the PC market. Those who
object will not be able to stop the march to the 800,000 physician offices with
their more efficient diagnostic and treatment facilities.
We
will be reviewing Clayton Christensen's book: THE INNOVATOR'S PRESCRIPTION - A Disruptive Solution for Health Care
and also John Kenagy's book: DESIGN TO
ADAPT - Leading Healthcare in Challenging Times.
Retail clinics will disrupt
primary care physicians' practices, pushing them up-market to disrupt
specialists - Clayton Christensen
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Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing
that ever has. -Margaret Mead
* * * * *
9. The Health Plan for the USA
HEALTH PLAN
USA, LLC: The PPT Presentation
The medical insurance scene
is changing rapidly in the United States. Change always creates new
opportunities. As healthcare changes resulting from the current reform become
clarified, HPUSA is the only true market-based plan that will transform the
industry from its current vertical structure to a horizontal structure outside
of Medicare, Medicaid, VA and any other government-sponsored plans.
It will duplicate the
efficiency of the Personal Computer Industry of the 1980s, when the mainframes
were going through major transitions. The mainframe of yesteryear that cost
millions of dollars were replaced by the PCs that now cost only a few hundred
dollars, have more power, more capability, more speed and more storage. Some
mainframes met their demise while others were able to look to new
opportunities. The computerized banking, debit/credit card and ATM networks,
for instance, would not be possible without the modern mainframe computers that
do multiple and variable transactions that occur anyplace worldwide, with
simultaneous access for millions requiring only a user-id and a secure
four-digit pass code.
Health care is ready to go
through the same progression from the vertical to the horizontal model.
Hospitals doing routine outpatient work are frequently ten to hundred times as
expensive as the small practice setting. It has been estimated that more than
half of the current work done in the high-cost hospital center (the mainframe)
could be done more efficiently and cost effectively in the small setting of the
800,000 private physician offices. Hospitals will be going through the same
reorganization that IBM and the other mainframes did and come out stronger with
a totally different medical business operating plan. This evolution will take
place in the near future. Entrepreneurship and digital information technology
is an unstoppable combination. Just as IBM could not stop this transition,
neither can hospitals nor the government prevent this inevitable efficiency in
health care.
Neither can it be stopped in
the socialized medicine countries. They had an interlude of 50 to 100 years of
tragic government medicine which is failing all over the world. Each country is
attempting some market base transition. However, after 50 to 100 years, there
are few alive that remember such a concept. Hence, the feeble attempt at this
effort. The triple play of the internet,
entrepreneurship, and individual capitalism is an unstoppable force around the
world, and that Individual
Capitalism is the force that will shape the 21st Century.
This initial PPT
presentation gives the basis for the next stage of healthcare reform. It will
give you background information on which the horizontal business plan of the
future will be based. This will decrease insurance premiums to about half what
they are today, and place the patient, in consultation with his physician,
completely in charge. There will be no muda (cost of billing, or
rebilling, prior-authorizations, pharmacy formularies, restricted physician
panels, etc.) to interfere with efficient and effective delivery of care.
Purchase
a copy of the PPT Presentation of HealthPlanUSA in our bookstore . . .
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* * * * *
10. Restoring
Accountability in Medical Practice by Non Participation in Government Programs and
Understanding the Devastating Force of Government
·
Medicine and Liberty - Network of Liberty Oriented Doctors, www.MedLib.ch/, Alphonse Crespo, MD, Executive
Director and Founder
Medicine & Liberty
(MedLib) is an independent physician network founded in 2007, dedicated to the
study and advocacy of liberty, ethics & market in medical services.
- We support professional autonomy for doctors and liberty of choice for
patients
- We uphold the Hippocratic covenant
that forbids action harmful to the patient
- We defend responsible medical
practice and access to therapeutic innovation free from
bureaucratic obstruction
- We work towards a deeper
understanding of the role and importance of liberty & market in
medical services
MedLib is part of a wide movement of ideas that
defends
- the self-ownership principle &
the property rights of individuals on the products of their
physical and intellectual work
- free markets, free enterprise and
strict limits to the role of the State
·
Entrepreneur-Country. Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne
Capital, (Sorry about the nepotism,
but her message is important to us in health care.) has launched Entrepreneur Country. Read their
manifesto for valuable information: 3. The bigger the State grows, the weaker the people
become - big government creates dependency . . . 5. No real, sustainable wealth creation through entrepreneurship
ever owed its success to government . . .
11. The triple play of the internet, entrepreneurship, and individual
capitalism is an unstoppable force around the world, and that Individual
Capitalism is the force that will shape the 21st Century . . . Read
the entire manifesto . . .
·
Americans for Tax
Reform, www.atr.org/,
Grover Norquist, President, keeps us apprised of the Cost of
Government Day® Report Read
the entire report and the rest of this section . . .
Happy
Cost of Government Day 2009!
This
year, Cost of Government Day (COGD) - the day of the calendar year on which the
average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her
share of the spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government on the
federal, state, and local levels - falls on August 12, which is almost a full
month later than in 2008.
In
last year's report, we cautioned that the looming entitlement crisis and
efforts to drastically increase regulations were threatening to move Cost of
Government Day later into the year.
However,
no one could have foreseen the magnitude of the federal spending spree that was
to begin in the second half of 2008, and has not abated since.
This
massive government spending spree - a Keynesian (and utterly flawed) response
to the financial market crisis and subsequent economic downturn - is the main
culprit for this year's late Cost of Government Day.
As a result, taxpayers have to work 224
days out of the year just to meet the cost imposed by all levels of government.
As
in previous years, this year's report seeks to shed light on the burden
government imposes on taxpayers. A new feature of the report is a series of
case studies taking a closer look at some of the more recent spending
initiatives and other proposals that are currently threatening taxpayers.
For
a broader perspective, we have included several narratives authored by
lawmakers and think tank representatives analyzing the cost of government at
the state level.
The recent federal spending spree paints a bleak
picture for taxpayers. It started with the passage of the financial market
bailout and continued with the "stimulus," the $410 billion
earmark-stuffed "omnibus," the $3.55 trillion budget, and more
bailouts leading to current threats of a national energy tax and a government
takeover of health care.
·
National Taxpayer's Union, www.ntu.org/main/, Duane Parde,
President, keeps us apprised of all the taxation challenges our elected
officials are trying to foist on us throughout the United States. To find the
organization in your state that's trying to keep sanity in our taxation system,
click on your state at www.ntu.org/main/groups.php.
August 13 you can work for yourself. It takes nearly 8 months of hard work for
every American to pay for the cost of government. Read
more . . .
·
Evolving Excellence - Lean Enterprise Leadership. Kevin Meyer, CEO of Superfactory, (Sorry about the
nepotism.) has a newsletter that impacts health care in many aspects. Join his evolving excellence blog . . . Excellence is every physician's middle name
and thus a natural affiliation for all of us.
This month, read his The Customer
is the Boss at FAVI "I came in the day after I became CEO, and
gathered the people. I told them tomorrow when you come to work, you do not
work for me or for a boss. You work for your customer. I don't pay you. They
do. . . . You do what is needed for the customer." And with that single
stroke, he eliminated the central control: personnel, product development,
purchasing…all gone. Looks like
something we should import into our hospitals. I believe every RN, given the
opportunity and the responsibility, could manage her ward of patients or
customers in a similar lean and efficient fashion.
·
FIRM: Freedom and
Individual Rights in Medicine, www.westandfirm.org, Lin Zinser, JD,
Founder, researches and studies the work of scholars and policy experts in the
areas of health care, law, philosophy, and economics to inform and to foster
public debate on the causes and potential solutions of rising costs of health
care and health insurance.
· Ayn Rand, a Philosophy for Living on Earth, www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer, is a veritable storehouse of common sense economics to help us live on earth. To review the current series of Op-Ed articles, some of which you and I may disagree on, go to www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_opeds
* * * * *
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intrude into Hillsdale's pro-Freedom, pro-American, gender and racially
integrated curriculum even before the country was integrated. This cost
Hillsdale, as I recall, $400 million to buyout all student loans and GI
benefits and pay the legal costs of freedom.
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Del
Meyer
Del Meyer, MD, CEO & Founder
DelMeyer@HealthPlanUSA.net
Satyam A Patel, MBA, CFO, & Co-Founder
SatyamPatel@HealthPlanUSA.net
HealthPlanUSA,
LLC
www.HealthPlanUSA.net
6945 Fair Oaks Blvd, Ste A-2, Carmichael, CA 95608
Words
of Wisdom
One nation,
under bureaucracy, with penalties and mandates for all. -The New IRS
"The more elaborate our means of communication,
the less we communicate." - Joseph Priestley: An 18th-century theologian and educator.
Healthcare
History
Always remember
that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the father of socialized medicine in
Germany, recognized in 1861 that a government gained loyalty by
making its citizens dependent on the state by social insurance. Thus socialized
medicine, or any single-payer initiative, was born for the benefit of the state
and of a contemptuous disregard for people's welfare.