A Bitter Pill to Swallow
Posted by: Scott W. Graves | 07/31/2007 10:10 PM
By Troy Senik
Going to the grocery store is something that we've all come to take for granted these days. With the abundance of information on food prices in your Sunday newspaper, the ability to build online shopping lists and the presence of electronic check-out lanes, a family of four can stock its cupboards, stick to a budget and complete their shopping in forty-five minutes.
But let's imagine a different reality. What if your local grocery store didn't advertise its latest sales and didn't even let you know how much your purchase would cost until you had checked out? What if, in addition, every trip to the market would take hours on end and you couldn't even find information on which stores were selling produce that was making customers ill? The results would be obvious. Grocers would take advantage of your ignorance and the high costs of information by raising prices and skimping on quality.
Surely consumers would cry foul if shopping for a basic need ever became so cumbersome. But if that's the case, then why do we continue to accept a health care system that is just as perverse as the hypothetical situation (hypothetical is an adjective and needs a noun to modify) depicted above? Indeed, to call what we currently have a "system" is a bit generous. The present framework for healthcare is a loose confederation of patients, providers and physicians that makes the IRS look like an object lesson in efficiency.
The solution, however, is not to place healthcare in the government's hands, but rather to empower consumers.
In March, Governor Schwarzenegger signed an executive order establishing an advisory board of public officials and private citizens to devise proposals for greater use of health information technology in the state of California by the end of the year. Simply put, the state is woefully behind in harnessing the benefits of the digital revolution to streamline an inefficient and deeply wasteful health system.
If California were to adopt a model along the lines of the one currently used by the Department of Veterans' Affairs (the nation's largest pilot program in health information), a single computerized record could allow your doctor instant access to your complete medical history, including tests, prescriptions, allergies, x-rays and immunizations. In addition, it could scan for possible health risks from prescription interactions, remind you of necessary future appointments and keep all of your billing records up to date. Oh yeah, and it just might save your life.
Not only can electronic health records bring together a lifetime's worth of medical data, they can also be utilized to track healthcare performance over time. Such databases have the potential to produce unrivaled advances in discovering which treatments are most effective against which ailments and which doctors are providing the most consistent results for their patients. Making these metrics available online would go a long way towards the kind of transparency and quality control that consumers have (justifiably) come to expect in the internet age.
Another online database has the potential to drastically reduce costs and move the pursuit of health onto the same buyer-friendly footing as your local grocer. Prescription drugs, which increase in price at an average of 8-9% a year, take a disproportionate chunk of your paycheck partially because most patients don't have the time to comparison shop between their local drugstores. As with the hapless shopper in the grocery store parable, the result tends to be higher prices without any difference in quality.
While Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush recognized this failure and pushed the state to create myfloridarx.com, a website that allows Floridians to comparison shop retail prices for the state's fifty most popular prescription drugs based on a simple search by ZIP code. Retailers who had been charging more than twice as much as their competitors for arthritis pills or fifteen times as much for inhaler cartridges quickly learned that a fair price would become part of the cost of doing business. California could do well to learn from Florida's example.
Before we let the people responsible for the tax code take over matters of life and death, these sorts of common sense solutions should be enacted. A wealthier, healthier California awaits.
Troy Senik has served on the writing staffs of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. In addition, he is a Research Fellow at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research and the founder of Coastal Conservatism, a group dedicated to formulating original public policy solutions for the state of California. He holds a master's degree in public policy from Pepperdine University and a bachelor's degree from Belmont University. Mr. Senik lives in Calabasas, California.
Going to the grocery store is something that we've all come to take for granted these days. With the abundance of information on food prices in your Sunday newspaper, the ability to build online shopping lists and the presence of electronic check-out lanes, a family of four can stock its cupboards, stick to a budget and complete their shopping in forty-five minutes.But let's imagine a different reality. What if your local grocery store didn't advertise its latest sales and didn't even let you know how much your purchase would cost until you had checked out? What if, in addition, every trip to the market would take hours on end and you couldn't even find information on which stores were selling produce that was making customers ill? The results would be obvious. Grocers would take advantage of your ignorance and the high costs of information by raising prices and skimping on quality.
Surely consumers would cry foul if shopping for a basic need ever became so cumbersome. But if that's the case, then why do we continue to accept a health care system that is just as perverse as the hypothetical situation (hypothetical is an adjective and needs a noun to modify) depicted above? Indeed, to call what we currently have a "system" is a bit generous. The present framework for healthcare is a loose confederation of patients, providers and physicians that makes the IRS look like an object lesson in efficiency.
The solution, however, is not to place healthcare in the government's hands, but rather to empower consumers.
In March, Governor Schwarzenegger signed an executive order establishing an advisory board of public officials and private citizens to devise proposals for greater use of health information technology in the state of California by the end of the year. Simply put, the state is woefully behind in harnessing the benefits of the digital revolution to streamline an inefficient and deeply wasteful health system.
If California were to adopt a model along the lines of the one currently used by the Department of Veterans' Affairs (the nation's largest pilot program in health information), a single computerized record could allow your doctor instant access to your complete medical history, including tests, prescriptions, allergies, x-rays and immunizations. In addition, it could scan for possible health risks from prescription interactions, remind you of necessary future appointments and keep all of your billing records up to date. Oh yeah, and it just might save your life.
Not only can electronic health records bring together a lifetime's worth of medical data, they can also be utilized to track healthcare performance over time. Such databases have the potential to produce unrivaled advances in discovering which treatments are most effective against which ailments and which doctors are providing the most consistent results for their patients. Making these metrics available online would go a long way towards the kind of transparency and quality control that consumers have (justifiably) come to expect in the internet age.
Another online database has the potential to drastically reduce costs and move the pursuit of health onto the same buyer-friendly footing as your local grocer. Prescription drugs, which increase in price at an average of 8-9% a year, take a disproportionate chunk of your paycheck partially because most patients don't have the time to comparison shop between their local drugstores. As with the hapless shopper in the grocery store parable, the result tends to be higher prices without any difference in quality.
While Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush recognized this failure and pushed the state to create myfloridarx.com, a website that allows Floridians to comparison shop retail prices for the state's fifty most popular prescription drugs based on a simple search by ZIP code. Retailers who had been charging more than twice as much as their competitors for arthritis pills or fifteen times as much for inhaler cartridges quickly learned that a fair price would become part of the cost of doing business. California could do well to learn from Florida's example.
Before we let the people responsible for the tax code take over matters of life and death, these sorts of common sense solutions should be enacted. A wealthier, healthier California awaits.
Troy Senik has served on the writing staffs of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. In addition, he is a Research Fellow at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research and the founder of Coastal Conservatism, a group dedicated to formulating original public policy solutions for the state of California. He holds a master's degree in public policy from Pepperdine University and a bachelor's degree from Belmont University. Mr. Senik lives in Calabasas, California.
