Kicking Over My Traces

David Goldhill opens a long article on health care reform with a description of how his father died of iatrogenic infections in an ICU — his father developed sepsis while hospitalized. Since his father’s death, and because of the manner of his father’s death, Mr. Goldhill has been reading, talking and asking a lot of questions.

Mr. Goldhill’s article is well worth reading.

Here is an excerpt near the end:

Doctor & Nurse Buy From Art.com

The most important single step we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as the single model for financing care. And a guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system. I believe if the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers—by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can’t afford care—we’d find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we’d see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result.

A more consumer-centered health-care system would not rely on a single form of financing for health-care purchases; it would make use of different sorts of financing for different elements of care—with routine care funded largely out of our incomes; major, predictable expenses (including much end-of-life care) funded by savings and credit; and massive, unpredictable expenses funded by insurance.

Creating a federal bureaucracy to rule on treatments and set payments puts too much power in the hands of the federal government, and removes decision-making power from those closest to the problem.

Read Mr. Goldhill’s article.

Then send another email to your Senators and Congressweasel. Include a link to the article. While long, the article is much shorter than the House version of Obamacare.

(Hat tip: Arnold Kling at EconLong.)

Tags: Financial services, health care, health insurance, health policy, Insurance

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 2:07 am +0000 GMT and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.