Quote:
Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
I was actually talking about the trend over the last couple of years where uninsured patients were suing hospitals for the size of their medical bills. Frankly, I thought that was a pretty lousy way of fixing the health care system (via lawsuit instead of policy).
I'm not sure what you mean by "payless" system, but I'm all for incentives for better health.
Incidently, the HMO concept was originally designed with the thought that a member would stick with his or her healthplan for decades. The PCP physicians, then would have incentives to educate patients on health, do screenings, get cholesterol down, etc. because they got to pocket the difference between the premiums and what actually went to the patient's healthcare over the course of the patient's lifetime. They had incentives to keep the patient's healty. What ended up happening, though, was that patients would move around from plan to plan and there wouldn't be any real incentive on the physician or the patient side to stay healthy. The HMOs now don't really look, in practice, like the models.
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Is that because people chose to move from plan to plan? Or is it because they had to -- either because they changed jobs, their employers changed providers, or (as has happened to me countless times) mergers among HMOs led to the plan effectively being changed on them?
