I was thinking about this lately. Can universal health care be solved by the free market, if the free market decides to enforce checks and balances on itself?
That is to say, could someone start a not-for-profit health insurance company that offers excellent coverage for affordable rates, and build it from the ground up with a culture of clarity and transparency? At a bare minimum they should have a searchable database where you can type in "broken arm" and find out what price this company has negotiated for casts, x-rays, and doctor time, and what it will cost you in co-pay.
It seems like insurance companies are so universally bad and corrupt that there would be no trouble signing up a critical mass of users by simply being a little better than the norm, and once it's the biggest insurance provider in the US, start applying muscle to hospital administration.
Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying it. Can anyone think of a way that it might be possible, though?
I'm not at all an expert, but from my limited perspective this looks like a problem that blockchain could potentially help with in the future.
It seems like someone could implement an open source system of smart contracts that automatically pay out healthcare costs and distribute expenses in a transparent and agreed upon way. The organization could have an extremely decreased overhead compared to a physical company because it would need almost no staff or infrastructure, and if everyone can see the source for how money moves as well as the distributed ledger for how spending works it would be highly corruption resistant while still allowing for security of doctor-patient confidentiality due to the encrypted nature of blockchain.
Of course it would by default being extremely susceptible to external abuse, would have a ton of complexities in interfacing with the healthcare system, and wouldn't be viable until/unless blockchain and related tech matures and gains mass market acceptance.
I could be totally wrong about the approach, but I'm really hopeful for the tech world to be able to make a dent in this mess. Hopefully some people with more experience have better ideas.
I see two problems, one is that consumers don't buy health insurance, their employers do. So the insurance company that is willing to deny legitimate claims and kick sick people off its rolls in order to lower its costs will win.
The bigger issue is that insurance is the wrong business model. Insurance is supposed to protect against a catastrophic risk, like a car crash or an earthquake, but we use health insurance in this country to cover routine and ongoing care. Whether there even is a "business model" to treat people is debatable. Sick people as a group tend to earn less than the healthy.
That is to say, could someone start a not-for-profit health insurance company that offers excellent coverage for affordable rates, and build it from the ground up with a culture of clarity and transparency? At a bare minimum they should have a searchable database where you can type in "broken arm" and find out what price this company has negotiated for casts, x-rays, and doctor time, and what it will cost you in co-pay.
It seems like insurance companies are so universally bad and corrupt that there would be no trouble signing up a critical mass of users by simply being a little better than the norm, and once it's the biggest insurance provider in the US, start applying muscle to hospital administration.
Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying it. Can anyone think of a way that it might be possible, though?