Having survived prostate cancer and now facing a mild form of Parkinson’s disease, former Intel chairman Andy Grove has turned his analytical eye on the increasingly dysfunctional U.S. healthcare system.
Grove is a smart guy, however his recommendations are disappointingly small-scale and reflective of the inordinate faith that many high-tech aficionados place in technological “fixes” for complex phenomena. That’s what David Hamilton, writer of VentureBeat Life Sciences argues in his latest look at the healthcare debate.
Note that David is covering daily venture capital investments in healthcare companies. You can bookmark his blog here, or subscribe to his RSS feed here.
3 Comments
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Mark Wendman said:
Here is an interesting anecdote.
I was considering getting an MRI, and I do not have health insurance. I go to the MRI lab contractor facility hosted inside the nearby hospital.
I ask how much will these (2-4 slices) MRI scans cost me.
Initial answer “$1350.00 each per slice.”
I mention this might be a little high, and I was surprised, but ok…
The clerk asks…”Can you pay cash?”
“Certainly.” I reply.
The clerk replies …. “then your cost is $550 per scan”
I know why this is the case, and I will point out that none of the planned / proposed “solutions to the healthcare crisis” will address this obviously large pricing discrepancy.
The rather large cash discount might well vary by case / procedure etc. but this is real, and MRIs are considerably less expensive than exploratory surgery etc. Timesaving and costsaving to begin with.
The apparent carry float of delayed bill payments by health insurers is likely the root of all evil so to speak.
Not record keeping, nor billing, nor geeze whiz bedside widgets, but billing payment delays and the overhead it incurs to everyone, including employers and employees and the general public.
food for thought.
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Gal Josefsberg said:
It’s not a technology fix. It’s a legislative fix. And by that I don’t mean that we need more legislation. In many ways, we need less legislation in the healthcare industry.
We need to take a step back, figure out what we want to have as a healthcare system here in the US and then implement the right solution. Everything else is just bandaids on top of symptoms, never really addressing the root cause.
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