A Better Health Care
The news and opinion pages are filled with debates about the national healthcare. I have my own uninformed thoughts on the matter but I’ll let them sit in my mind. I found this article about one person’s opinion on healthcare reform. The main driving force of what he’s saying (or at least what I took away from it) was to have a consumer driven force to lower healthcare costs rather than perpetuate way heath insurance props up inflated costs. One example he used was Lasik surgery and how an open market has made the operation cheaper and safer. It made me think of my own dental experience.
When I came to college, I basically stopped seeing the dentist. The first time I went when I started working had easily been 3 to 4 years since my previous exam. A periodontal exam revealed there was much inflammation and bacteria around my teeth and I had early to moderate gum disease. We scheduled a deep cleaning to clear out the bacteria. Afterwards, my gums were clean and my teeth looked much better and healthier. The total price tag after insurance to me was over $400.
Periodontal disease is preventable by purchasing floss for $1/mo and spending 3 minutes a day to floss. This minor investment would have saved my $400 and even more if it had advanced and required surgery. My dentist, hygienist, and mom always told me to floss. I never listened to them. However, attach a $400 bill and now you have my attention. I now habitually floss.
If you want to prevent something, attaching a large bill is a good deterrent. If I only had to pay a $10 copay for the procedure, I probably would not have been as serious about it as I was. The market is a good influencer to change people’s behavior. As proven by Safeway, a good way to drive down healthcare costs is to give financial incentives to people to become healthy. The majority of health problems are preventable. We can decrease the cost of healthcare by increasing and encouraging health prevention.