Consumer Driven Healthcare

I just finished reading what is probably the best book I have ever read on this subject. The book is “Who Killed Health Care?” by Regina Herzlinger. In the book, Ms. Herzlinger lays out a plan to provide for health care for everyone while at the same time, REDUCING government involvement in the system. She calls her plan “Consumer Driven Health Care”. It basically creates a system whereby the individual consumer drives the market. Not a good idea, you say? In most other areas of business, this is how things already work. She presents this argument against a government run, single payer system in which the government would say what medical treatment you could and couldn’t have. What if the government was equally involved in the auto industry? We would all be driving the exact same car because the government would mandate how the car was built, what color it was, what features it had, what options it had, etc. We would also all pay the same price because the government would mandate that as well. What do we actually have in the auto industry? We have manufacturers who make cars with the features we want, competitive on price, etc. Competition has brought us more choice than ever before and more affordability than ever before. Why can the same not work in health care? Well, it will require significant restructuring of the industry. I will leave it to the book, for now, to make the case for those changes. I will attempt in future posts to explain it the best I can, but can not do justice to what it took an entire book to lay out.