Why Health Care Reform
Opportunity
The light bulb has gone on – Health care is an economic issue. Quantum leaps in marketplaces take place when there is a convergence – a convergence of ideas, of potential for change, and of purpose. The health care marketplace has never lacked for ideas or for potential for change, but it has until recently lacked the purpose behind major systemic health care reform. Only recently have state and local governments and businesses realized that access to health care is inherently local and is a critical factor in developing a robust, productive economy at the state and local level.
The problem is not whether you are insured or uninsured, but whether you have access to appropriate, cost-effective health care and in the United States, no one does. At either end of the spectrum – Medicaid and the privately insured – the problem is an excess of health care capacity and costs, that leads to perverse incentives to under-pay and over-use in Medicaid and to over-charge and over-use for the privately insured. Caught in the middle is the backbone of our economy, the working middle class, the largest growing portion of our economy that has neither the legal right to under-pay nor the financial means to pay for the over-charge even for appropriate usage.
The purpose behind health care reform is now clear – to develop a healthy, productive economic engine, states and municipalities must have a healthy, productive workforce at the local level.
This Convergence
Potential for Change
Develop a more efficient, effective allocation of health care resources.
Idea
Blur the lines between existing payor sources in the market to eliminate artificial barriers that insulate all participants from the true cost of health care (both under-payment and over-payment) and cause individuals to make poor economic decisions about their health care.
Purpose
By developing a more transparent, rational health care marketplace, excess health care costs, and opportunity will be transferred from those who don’t need it with no reduction in their productivity to those who desperately need it with a substantial increase in their productivity