I’m doing the daily thing this morning and peruse by a new site, HealthInsurance.org, where six of the first six articles are about Obamacare and the seventh is about health insurance carrier greed.  I wanted to make a couple of observations about what these blogs are saying.

In the first article, Harold Pollack wonders if the nation can ignore a ’drumbeat of cynicism’ and deliver health reform gains under a new administration.  Another, by Daniel E. Dawes, Dissecting Obamacare and its Impact, is an obvious softball about how Obamacare isn’t failing, it is being mischaracterized by the media.  Finally, Louise Norris tells us how to “Escape the Crush of Premium Increases.”  Basically her take is to use accounting tricks to get the government to pay part of your healthcare, get a non-compliant policy that covers only catastrophic illnesses/injuries or just do without.  I pay for government, you pay for government, why should we be forced to subsidize someone else’s insurance premium?

So once again, here we are wondering how to pay for healthcare.  I think that the first order of business is to take the business out of healthcare.  Either you are a doctor or you are a patient or you don’t need to be involved.  You who have been following along know that Sentia Health proposes to provide a free electronic health records system (EHR) to doctors that will allow them to document the care they provide for their patients.  If that patient insures with us, we will issue payment for procedures performed, in near real time.  This eliminates several systems: medical coding, insurance adjudication, the entire insurance infrastructure with the big buildings, the cast of millions and yes the money they put in their pockets (see the History (of health carrier greed) on the same page we have been talking about) and the entire electronic health records industry.  In lieu of all this wasted motion and greed, we will manage all the data for a low cost subscription of $10/month.
 

Before you comment below and flame me, this is instead of traditional insurance, not in addition to.  In the beginning, at least, we will have the same or similar policies, that work the same way, but be about 1/3 less expensive due to automating the entire process.  We will turn every dollar we collect outside of the subscription fee over to your healthcare provider to keep you healthy, instead of wasting it on real estate, salaries and lining our own pockets.  

Even better, we will provide things like a self-scheduler that will allow you to set up your own appointments with your practitioner.  We will provide a secure email system so you can email your doctor questions.  We will provide a portal for you to fill out questionnaires from home instead of sitting in a waiting room with a pen and a form filling out name, address and phone number over and over.  We will provide patient education that backs up and documents what your doctor instructs you to do and shows you how to do it.  You know can control your cholesterol with diet and exercise and this will show you how, and probably lose some weight at the same time.

Yes, we are a for profit company.  Yes, we have decided that $10 per month is enough, even knowing that your current insurance provider wastes about ten times that much and charges you, dear reader, an average of about $100 per month to manage your data.  We have plans to bring these kinds of efficiencies to every facet of healthcare and eventually to every facet of life.  If you don't like us, that's fine.  This kind of automation is going to happen, we just happen to be the first company to not only propose it, but to write the software to support it.  Use another company.  That's fine, we don't care.  Just don't continue to support the fat cat MBAs who run the current crop of insurance companies.  You deserve better than to be ripped off one more time by companies that  are literally killing people for profit.  

There is a better way.  Automation is the better way.  This is the better way.