When will Medical Cost Reduction Come ?

My years in manufacturing taught me to automate what we could and simplify processes to improve quality and lower cost.  We moved these ideas to design and began to identify simple design rules to use to streamline the entire process from design to final assembly. The advances we made had various names and today we use terms like Lean Manufacturing and Supply Chain and the development continues.

In Medicine, they’ve followed earlier versions of management styles, but the emphasis has been 19^th century like increasing equipment and lab test utilization to increase billing and avoid malpractice suits.

The big lie about medicine is that it can do miracles.  The fact is that all patients are different and treatments may or not work.  Imagine your auto mechanic billing you for two repairs, because the earlier one didn’t work.  In auto mechanics, parts are more replaceable than they’ve ever been.  In medicine, patients are more different than they’ve ever been. A given set of symptoms could fit any number of different diseases.

Another big lie is that all people should receive treatment everywhere whether they can afford it or not.  Demanding that all indigent patients receive treatment at private hospitals has done as much damage as giving mortgage loans to unqualified illegal aliens. 

Individual doctors and groups have opened practices that don’t take insurance and have cost-reduced their practices.  Some doctors are interested in holistic Medicine, some are looking at Chinese medical treatments.  There is some hope we will eventually have some cost competitiveness in the system.

Drugs for life-threatening conditions are way overpriced. It would be cheaper to jet to Mexico for snake-bite treatment than pay the $250,000 it costs in the U.S.  Patients need to be given a choice of drugs based on cost to put some pressure on the sky high drugs.  It’s time to ask what drugs were used for snakebite in 1960.

We have long passed the a price / demand curve point in main-stream U.S. medicine.  Overpriced insurance will be dropped in favor of catastrophic coverage if Obama-care is repealed. Patients are refusing high cost treatments even though their insurance would pay for most of it.  More are opting for home healthcare when possible. Patients don’t want to pay the overhead for maintaining expensive hospitals.

The Healthcare Industry needs to rethink all processes to reduce costs to what individuals could pay for themselves without government subsidies.  When the dollar crashes and government is bankrupt, we will all need to rethink our processes.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader