A Modest Proposal for Reforming the Health Care System

By John Lawrence

The best antidote for a degenerative disease is a regenerative lifestyle

The health care system, what I call the medical-industrial complex, is in reality a disease management system. It does little to promote health and makes money only when people get sick or injured. Doctors only make money when they treat a sick patient. They make nothing for keeping them well. This is the so-called fee for service model and it stinks. It drives up disease care costs. Pharmaceutical corporations create drugs and advertise them on TV in order to get as many people as possible hooked on them. Doctors do little to treat underlying diseases but willingly prescribe drugs to ameliorate symptoms. The big money is in surgery. Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act, while it has placed into law important provisions such as disallowing rescission, disallowing kicking people off of health insurance policies due to preexisting conditions, providing for not quite universal coverage etc, it does little or nothing to actually make health care affordable. Hospitals charge exhorbitant rates according to their Chargemasters. In some cases they won't accept a patient's insurance coverage, demanding upfront payment in cash instead. Obamacare does little to keep pharmaceutical costs, health insurance costs or hospital costs down. I have written a number of critical articles about the health care system. But I don't want to leave the impression that all I'm doing is to just tear this leviathan down in a critical and negative way and have nothing positive to say regarding the health care system. I do have some positive suggestions about how it could be improved.