Health Care Quality

Associated question(s) or comments:
- How will health care quality be impacted by having national health insurance?

Background: Preliminary information about physicians

• Many U.S. physicians are not satisfied with their profession and would not recommend that others enter the profession. See Sources, below.
• As indicated by available data on medical school openings in the U.S. vs. Canada, the interest in becoming a physician is over twice has high a demand in Canada than it is in the U.S. - See [

Summary of What Changes in Health Care Due to a Simpler Way of Paying for It

• Recovery and creation of businesses and jobs due to better U.S. status in global competition
  • This improvement applies to all businesses and services, including health care.
  • Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in interest for having healthcare done in other countries, such as the examples of India and Thailand, among others. Why? Businesses not only search for countries with reasonable labor costs (such as all those other countries with national health insurance), but some companies encourage their employees to go to other countries for medical procedures. Businesses and individuals want reasonably priced health care.
• Better job satisfaction for the average person in the medical profession; therefore, increased interest in going into the medical profession

Impact on Health Care Quality

• Positive impact on our family physicians
  • More time to spend on patient care
    • Elimination of health insurance company bureaucracy
    • Elimination of government bureaucracy
  • Lower cost to operate their private practices
    • Dramatically smaller office staff due to dramatically simplified payments to physicians by one public agency
      • Note: unneeded staff will have a generous transition support to a new career, which could be in the projected 2.6 million health care jobs that will be opening due to the expanded health care support in the U.S. (Need a link to the report here.)
    • The remaining staff can focus more on patients and not have to deal with the bureaucracy
    • Lower cost of malpractice insurance, because a major contributor to the amount of a lawsuit and potential award is the projected cost of health care for the rest of the injured person’s life. That cost of health care will not exist, since no citizen will have any major medical bills.
• Positive Impact on Health Habits
  • Physicians’ additional focus on patients can provide time to provide additional focus on preventing disease by better health habits.
• Prescriptions More Likely to be Filled
  • Negotiated drug prices will finally become a reality like they’ve been in other countries for decades!
  • People will be able to afford their medicines as well as buy food for the table
• Health Outcomes Have Only One Way to Go U.S. health outcomes have just about no where to go but up
  • U.S. life expectancy dropped from 27th to 30th in the world as reported in June 2008
  • U.S. ability to minimize deaths due to PREVENTABLE diseases dropped to the bottom: from 15th out of 19 countries to 19th out of 19 countries; the resulting unnecessary deaths are huge numbers of real people, people we knew and loved — as reported in January 2008.
  • “Compared with five other nations – Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom—the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives.” - the latest “Mirror, Mirror …” report by the Commonwealth Fund.

Additional Information

• Peace of Mind due to everyone having access to health care without worry of ever receiving a major medical bill
  • The benefits of this situation are covered elsewhere at this web site and are only somewhat related to the quality of care itself.
• Real life stories of Americans in the U.S. and Americans in other countries.
• A personal experience. On the day that this web page was created I had just been to the doctor for a physical the day before. I was told that the doctor’s office considered my order for a CT-Scan to be very straightforward, especially because it was the last scan of a series of scans to confirm that a lung nodule is not cancerous. Yet I waited and the medical clerk waited until the health insurance company representative considered all of the answers to their questions and then gave the “pre-authorization” approval to get the CT-Scan. The physicians and the patient should make these decisions, not a health insurance company!

Sources

See the available report with the results of a survey of 12,000 physicians. Health Outcomes

Health Care Quality? Better!