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Health Quality Measures

Posted in Uncategorized | August 27th, 2011

health quality measures
What cost effective measures can be implimented by the government in re to health care related benefits?

how has the effort to manage costs effected the quality of health care since the inception of managed health care programs?

Prohibiting lawsuits against health care providers would remove the only quality control check there is in the system. Just as insurance companies can deny you life-saving care in order to make bigger bonuses, careless or greedy providers would have no need to straighten out their act when they kill people through incompetence or negligence if people who were wronged could not sue. Not to mention the fact that it is the same few incompetent providers who get sued over and over again, yet who keep their licenses and keep hurting people, often with the help of state privacy laws.

But that is neither here nor there, and it doesn’t address the issue of saving money per health care related benefits.

Managed health care has already added another layer of restriction to the people who are “served” by it. The extra paperwork required for people to get the care they need has actually increased the cost to the system.

In my opinion, the system has already implemented so many restrictions on benefits that there really aren’t any more to apply. Even people with insurance are fighting the system and not getting the care they need. We have massive health care rationing in this country, not only to the uninsured, but to the insured as well, who are often denied legitimate claims and end up costing the system thousands of dollars to fight the claim, which should never have been denied in the first place.

Example: a friend of mine went to the emergency room with sudden severe abdominal pain. They operated immediately and saved his life. He would have died if he had gone a few hours later. The insurance company denied reimbursement because he had not arranged days in advance for approval to have the surgery.

We spend 1/3 of our health care dollars on administration, as opposed to 2% for Medicare. The bureaucratic requirements of any new restrictions would ratchet that up even higher.

The most cost effective thing we can do is stop the restrictions. Although may seem counterintuitive, it would be cheaper just to pay for everybody’s health care than what we pay now to keep people from getting it. If you have health insurance, you would pay less than you are paying now for insurance premiums, copayments, deductibles, and all that stuff they won’t cover if you really get sick. ∠°)