chemTrailActivist · @chemTrailActivi
24th Nov 2013 from TwitLonger
#ObamaCare #ReginaHerzlinger
[Republicans must embrace universal health insurance coverage, including the individual mandate. Democrats must give up ALL public options, including Medicare and Medicaid. i.e., when hell freezes over]
According to the World Health Organization, the United States spends 17.2 percent of its GDP on health care, compared with Switzerland’s 10.8 percent.
Regina Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at Harvard and expert on the Swiss model of health care, says she believes there are three reasons why Switzerland is able to keep its costs under control.
“One reason is there are more insurance companies, far more than we have,” she explains.
“The second reason is it’s consumer-driven, so people can shop and buy wherever they want as long as the insurance policies offer the required benefits. And because it’s a real consumer-driven market, there’s much more transparency than in an employer-driven market. The buyers want to know the price, and they get a lot of information about the product.
And thirdly, all insurance policies have a deductible, so you can’t get 100 percent insurance coverage.”
Annual out-of-pocket expenses are capped in Switzerland at 2,500 Swiss francs — about $2,700 — so even the sickest citizens won’t end up paying tens of thousands of francs for their annual health care needs.
And for brokers, the gross margins in the Swiss system are vastly different.
“As we move more and more toward a Swiss-style system, the good news is that there will be more customers,” Dr. Herzlinger says.
“The bad news is that the value per customer is lower.”
But she adds that for consumers, the advantages to a system that relies on private insurance are myriad.
“The doctors don’t know if you’re poor, and they don’t even care, because you have the same insurance as everybody else,” she notes.
“There are a lot of advantages to this financing system, and I think we’re starting down the path toward getting there.”
http://www.benefitspro.com/2013/11/11/the-swiss-effect
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Patients will need tools to identify value, including consumer-friendly information on quality, and true price transparency.
Professor Regina Herzlinger of the Harvard Business School, one of the nation’s top health care economists, has suggested the creation of a consumer information center similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to give patients access to unbiased, consolidated information.
Some of this information is available now, but is often incomplete or has questionable reliability.
Instead, “the health care version of the SEC could collect the data and make it public while the private sector can analyze the data, producing reports and information that are meaningful to consumers.”
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/11/what-obamacares-pay-for-performance-programs-mean-for-health-care-quality