Obama transition health care e-forum for Waccobb community: question 1

[Dynamique]

Q: Briefly, from your own experience, what do you perceive is the biggest problem in the health system?

Response from in-person forum:
The cost of health care is the biggest problem. The for-profit model is unfair, unjust and creates exorbitant unneeded expense.

[Lisa W]

Too expensive for most people, particularly those most in need - the elderly and people who are unable to work due to chronic illness or disability.

[Zeno Swijtink]

An important problem is the breakdown of evidence based medicine in the area of drugs, because of the financial entanglement of academic researchers from the prestigious medical schools and the drug industry.

I can't assess the extent to which this has added to the cost of healthcare. It certainly has corroded trust, integrity, quality of care.

See:

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, by Marcia Angell. New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009.

Pharmaceutical Industry-Physician "Entanglement" Affects Research, Care, by Laurie Barclay, MD, BMJ. 2003;326

[gypsey]

Another major issue with our health care system is that of the lack of information technology. Canada has been using Smart Cards for decades to track people's health care and medication records eliminating onerous paperwork and confusion. A recent New York Times article estimated this change alone could reduce health care costs in the USA dramaticly.

[hiloboy]

A key problem with the current "system" is that there are many duplicated services in the insurance layer.
Say we have 100 insurance companies; they each have their own admin, sales, marketing, accounting, collections department. Wasteful overlap which could be altered with a single payer system. Take the excessive profit out of health care.

Also, integration at the health services level has, well, disintegrated.
The insurers tell you which lab you have to use; even though it's across town, but you don't learn this until you go to your local lab and they tell you. With single payer you could use any lab, anywhere. It can take an entire day to get a lab test for instance.

[Cheingrand]

Another problem with current health plans is that mental illness coverage is usually inadequate even if you can get coverage. There are short limits to the number of times mental illness problems can be seen by a provider. As a pre-existing condition, a person with a mental illness is rapidly turned down if trying to get new coverage or change coverage.