Consumer Driven Health Care

TW: This piece reviews the ideas of Regina Herzlinger, a health care thinker. She focuses on the health care consumer as the basis for reform. Her ideas are interesting but again, as we have discussed, there are powerful forces aligned against many of her ideas.

From Business Week:
"...Herzlinger has been called a health-care heretic because she supports neither government- nor corporate-provided health insurance. Instead, she focuses on the needs of the consumer, the neglected party in many health reform debates.

"Why can't health care be run like the retail sector?" she asks. If hospitals, insurers, and doctors all had to compete in the open market for patient-customers, she believes innovation would flourish, prices would come down, and quality would improve...in her ideal world:

•Consumers tailor their own health-care coverage, navigating in a national insurance market.
•Everyone must buy insurance, and the federal government maintains strict oversight to ensure price and coverage fairness.
•Small, disease-specific hospitals care for patients who don't need all the services offered by medical centers.
•A national database contains the prices and outcomes for procedures at every hospital and clinic, so consumers can make informed choices.
•Individuals get generous tax breaks to buy their own insurance, with subsidies for those with low incomes.
None of this sounds exactly like any Democrat or Republican proposal...

...Herzlinger's critics, and they are many, argue that health care is too complex for consumers to sort out on their own, and insurance too costly a burden for the individual....

Although she is a registered Republican and a fellow at the libertarian Manhattan Institute think tank, Herzlinger does not want a regulation-free market. Nor does she think health savings accounts, favored by many Republicans, are the best solution. These plans, which combine high deductibles with tax exemptions for health-care dollars, have been ­adopted by only about 6% of Americans, and she figures that's about right...

she charges that hospitals, insurers, government, managed-care providers, corporations, and even her fellow academics are arrayed against the consumer, all of them locked in a struggle to control the medical industry...
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_51/b4113066375246.htm