How Do You Compete for Your Health?

I suspect that you think that we already have competition in our Health Care system. After all, you can choose what doctor or hospital that you want to go to. You can even seek out different treatment methods if you desire. It’s a shopper’s paradise. And isn’t that a free-market and the very definition of competition? It is if you can afford to actually do these things, choose that is; and if you have a health care insurer that doesn’t constrain your choices or limits the funding that your coverage will pay for.

But it isn’t if the competition isn’t even yours to leverage. If you are operating under a process that lists out the payments that will be made to physicians and other providers then you are not controlling any monetary incentive and thus there is no motivation for providers to compete at any effective level.

Competition by insurance companies if focused at you or your company, doesn’t provide a motivation for improvement if they are only looking for ways to limit their costs and constrain your options or coverage.

Competition is not in play within the process in the current system by offering fees for services/procedures. The competition that takes place under this scheme is not targeted at you, at improving your medical benefits, or at reducing the cost for providing health care to end-users. The free-market motivation of a fee for service/procedure is to do more procedures and provide more services. It doesn’t matter if these procedures are to your benefit or not.

Therefore a new form and focus for competition in the health care system is needed to use the profit motive as a driving force behind improving health care. Make the means of payment a health-oriented and cost-efficiency methodology, and you will stimulate the industry and its providers to move toward an ever improving health care system.