The Problem with Healthcare is ‘Disconnection’

Abstract

The U.S. healthcare system is an ongoing failure: care is increasingly unaffordable, and doctors are harder, sometimes impossible, to find. Over the past half century, the federal government has passed innumerable regulatory “fixes” for healthcare which have not only failed – they have backfired, badly. Washington has expended trillions of taxpayer dollars and succeeded in making medical care less accessible. Systems theory, a novel approach to healthcare, was applied for economic analysis of the healthcare market. It revealed a cure for our sick system. U.S. healthcare is a centrally controlled, not a free, marketplace. Therefore, it lacks the free-market forces that normally balance supply and demand. In a centrally controlled market like healthcare, buyer and seller are disconnected by the federal government, which acts as the third-party payer and decision-maker. The resulting imbalance of supply and demand, created by disconnection, causes the unaffordability and inaccessibility of care. A program called Empower Patients is the cure, a permanent, effective solution. It reconnects buyer (patient) with seller (provider) removing the third-party government as decision-maker. When patients are in control of their own money and their own destiny, medical care in the U.S. will become high quality, readily accessible, timely, and affordable.