chooky fuzzbang: best healthcare money can buy
Goodness, my friend is an absolute blogging machine. In addition to having remarkably good insight, he churns out content at a fantastic rate. Highly recommended subscription.
As to this article, using math and healthcare seems like such a super straight forward thing to do, but no one ever does it. In college (many moons ago), I took a class in Medical Philosophy where the prof suggested that all you need to do is outcome studies on procedures and that dictates whether or not a given procedure should be paid for. For example, open heart surgery on a 35 y/o 170 lb man with 17% body fat yields 30 additional years of life. Open heart surgery on a 85 y/o 160 lb man with 17% body fat yields 2 additional years. Draw a line at the number of years or pain improvement (or whatever metric you want) and things above the line get paid for, things below the line do not. Done!
As to Chooky's point about why US healthcare is so much worse than other countries, I think it's a combination of the above (paying for and supporting procedures that should not be undertaken) and a complete lack of preventative medicine. I wish my company charged me based on whether or not I was in shape. People who are not in shape MUST pay more. Bad drivers pay more. Bad credit risks pay more. Being in shape is the exact same thing, and should be passed on to the consumer. And this would spurr a massive preventative campaign to get within the right boundaries. Of course, there will be the worker who chooses to opt out of insurance because it's too much money and she's not in the right boundaries and then she dies of a perfectly preventable disease and there are hearings out the ying-yang. But sad though that story may be, being hardline with this will allow a higher quality of care for everyone.