Health Care

I stayed up until 2:00AM last night talking with Dave about fixing health care in the US. What do we know about it? Well, nothing really, but we still like to talk.

We came up with the idea that malpractice insurance should be purchased by the patients, rather than the doctors, on an incident by incident basis. So, for example, if you're having a regular checkup you can wave the insurance altogether or pay a dollar just in case she overlooks your high cholesterol. On the other hand, if you are about to have major surgery, you pay more because the chances of something going wrong is higher.

This could keep the cost of providing health care down by offsetting one of the most expensive and least productive medical overhead expenses. It also reduces the overall cost by allowing patients to choose the level(s) of coverage, which will likely be lower in many cases than the doctor would otherwise be paying for. It could also make malpractice claims easier on the court systems by specifying that an arbitrator, not a jury, decides the outcome (unless the purchaser wants to pay extra, of course).

A similar option would be to build malpractice insurance into health insurance, especially for situations in which the purchaser may be unable to purchase the insurance up front (e.g. in an emergency), but we didn't discuss that idea very much.

Of course, this doesn't "fix" health care but it could help. Any thoughts?