Private healthcare done right

[quikchange]

In order to volunteer with kids at the local writing centre, I needed to get a TB test. A quick search for the nearest place that would conduct such a test for me revealed the existence of what looked like an excellent example of private healthcare at its finest. Curious, I decided to pony up the $30 and find out how well they work in practise.

Comments

[caffeinemonkey]

Do you include people who cannot pay in "emergency situations"? Not everyone would be able to afford all the procedures they need. Given that most people consider health care a basic human right, denying it to the poor does not seem right. Even "routine simple procedures" can be life-saving

[quikchange]

An emergency is defined by the time-sensitivity with which treatment is needed, not by the cost. That said, I certainly do not believe that it would be a good idea for our society to ignore the healthcare needs of people who are not fortunate enough to have a level of disposal income that would allow them to pay for non-emergency healthcare. But payment is a different problem and should be addressed using a mechanism that isn't tightly coupled to provider selection. Canada's universal payment system, for instance, gives everybody the same access to healthcare but still allows customer choice to dictate the success and failure of individual providers in the healthcare marketplace. The problem with the US approach to healthcare is that it's not possible for a new entrant to have access to the entire marketplace since the subsidized payment systems are limited to small subsets of providers.

[jamincan]

At present, Canada's system really isn't that different. The delivery model is primarily privately operated, it's just the insurance that is a public monopoly for the most part. The insurance doesn't really affect the delivery of healthcare, just the payment. The problem in providing improved services isn't so much private v. public; it's the availability of doctors. If there were more doctors in Canada, people actually would have a choice and have the freedom to move their business elsewhere. Unfortunately, except in certain situations, that isn't the case and most doctors simply have too many patients to see in the time they have.

[quikchange]

Yes, Canada's problem could be alleviated by removing the insanely high barriers to entry for people wishing to be doctors and then simply tracking the performance of doctors in a publicly available database so people can rank them by whatever criteria they wish when selecting a doctor for routine procedures. It may still be desirable to impose the stringent centralized selection criteria when qualifying doctors to handle emergency situations where the patients will not have the luxury of sifting through the database to find a doctor who satisfies their individual criteria.

I would move to have a 2-tier system of doctors: those who qualify under the current system would be allowed to perform emergency procedures; other, who meet a much lower bar (e.g. that of a pharmacist), would be allowed to perform any non-emergency medical procedures but their performance (both medical success and patient reviews) in each case would be recorded and made available publicly so people could select their doctor on the basis of past performance.

[tangbu]

So you think the government should increase taxes on unhealthy behaviour, such as drinking and smoking? I doubt that the public would put up with such meddling in their freedoms :-(.

[quikchange]

is this the same public that would like to receive publicly funded healthcare?

[ryan_singer]

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