Good News in a Bad News Industry

Good News in a Bad News Industry

I have come to the conclusion that the main reason my medical free market and transparent pricing message has been so widely and warmly embraced is very simply that it is good news.  I have been viewed as a good news guy in a bad news industry.  That “here is what we do and here is how much it will cost,” has been received as such good news is an indication of how truly cartelized the medical industry has become. 

To be fair, the bad news of Obamacare, has made our message even more appealing.  Nothing about this Unaffordable Care Act is good news.  Insurance premiums and the costs of healthcare are skyrocketting due to this legislation, access to care is problematic due to physician retirements and employers are laying people off or moving them to part time positions in order to keep their doors open.  Recently, The Associated Press’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports that some of the sickest and most vulnerable patients will be unable to afford the increasingly high out-of-pocket costs for the drugs they depend on for their very survival. 

All of this is quite predicable, actually, as Obamacare was, I believe, meant to fail.  The purpose of this legislation, seen in this rare slip by Rep. Barney Frank, was to introduce such price increases that the American people would beg the government for relief:  single payer.

This failure currently and long term, however, is beneficial to this administration’s corporate healthcare buddies on Wall Street.  Seriously, how would you like to provide a product or service(health insurance) the purchase of which the federal government made mandatory?  How would you like to know that your business (giant hospital) will collect from the distant taxpayers, rather than the patients you are supposedly meant to serve?  The giants of corporate healthcare are making record profits, profits that will pale when compared to their future ones as the great consolidation of this industry takes place. 

But I said I was a good news guy.  Here then is the reason for hope.  As the costs of healthcare and insurance spiral out of control patients and businesses will increase their out of pocket deductible exposure and do something that has long been absent in the medical industry:  shop.  Patients will shop for price and quality just like they do for everything else.  This, of course, is the unanticipated nightmare of the Obamacare bureaucrats, as real competition will appear (it already has, check out my pricing listed on our website) and actual price deflation will result.  The crisis this adminstration has attempted to create will paradoxically create the cure to the mess that the government and their cronies have made of the medical industry. 

Patients travel to our surgery center from all over the country to take advantage of our upfront and fair pricing.  Indeed, the first patients to show up after we put our prices online were Canadians!  In addition to the patients who travel to our center, many patients are using our pricing to leverage better pricing in their local medical markets.  As I stated on the John Stossel Show last month, a Georgia hospital recently agreed to charge a patient $4000 for a prostate surgery (rather than the $40,000 initially quoted) after the patient showed them our online price of $3600 and a plane ticket. 

There is more good news.

Medical facilities and physicians all over the country are jumping on this free market medicine model.  The AMA continues, and deservedly so, to lose members, while membership in the free market Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) soars.  The AAPS growth is largely due to its advocacy of third-party-free physician practices, a model that removes the bureaucrat from the exam room.  Big hospitals on physician hiring binges are finding that once they become employees, doctors go on vacation, working less and less, making this patient-disenfranchising model very unstable.  More employers are punching out of traditional insurance and seceding from this cartelized system by self-funding, taking the control of their employee health plans away from those insurance carriers whose interests differ from their own. 

I could go on.  The good news in health care is not Obamacare, but rather is in spite of Obamacare.  The free market competition that this legislation has unintentionally spawned will improve quality and lower prices just as competition has done (without exception) in every other industry.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.