Americans have opted for mandatory health insurance and are treating it as universal healthcare. Do not expect an increase in the level or quality of actual healthcare in the country. As a patient you may have already noticed that the utility of a visit to your doctor has decreased and is continuing to decrease further with every passing day. This is because your doctor is dealing directly with your insurance company and only indirectly with you as a patient. Your doctor’s bottom line is determined by his relationship with your insurance carrier and not you. A doctors income is greatly enhanced by accommodating the goals of the insurance companies he works and hardly at all by accommodating you as a patient.

A doctor is not likely to diagnose a problem that is not profitable to treat. From now on, your treatment will be based more on equilibriums physicians and insurance companies establish with one another and less by what you need as a patient.

When free markets are abandoned, good will disappears along with them. Expect high costs and poor results until the inevitable happens. Patients will eventually find successful ways to deal with their health issues. Rigged markets always unravel and healthcare will unravel also. In the short run unsuspecting patients will be easy to exploit. Over time, alternatives to mass market medicine will emerge. Do I know what the alternatives will be? No, but I do know how markets function and that market influences never completely disappear when they are stifled.

Remember the days of the only phone company in town? The development of the mobile phone changed all of that. Something of that nature will happen in medicine. You can count on it.

For now though, expect conditions to go undiagnosed or mis diagnosed. Expect to pay a lot and get very little.

Views: 1