THE GROWING HEALTHCARE CRISIS AND THE RISE OF "DESTINATION HEALTHCARE."
This article written by Douglas Castle (http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com) for first publication in The Global Futurist (http://TheGlobalFuturist.blogspot.com).
Dear Readers:
At present, in the United States and in an increasing number of industrialized and even non-industrialized nations, there is a hospital-based healthcare crisis that will be imperiling the quality of all hospital-provided healthcare during the next three years. As you would suspect, it is attributable to that sad, inappropriate ordering of priorities -- profits, first...patients, second -- that will precipate one of the biggest hospital-based healthcare quality declines in world history.
The United States is leading the way in terms of increasing expense, increasing waste, unnecessary but potentially dangerous procedures, gross mismanagement of funds and lack of adequately trained and managed professional and non-professional staff. Other countries are following suit, but at not falling apart at the seams to the extent that we are.
Background:
Hospitals are capitalized through a combination of sources, excluding the religiously-affiliated "special cases". These include: endowments from wealthy donors, board members and trustees; investment by big pharmaceuticals companies (usually to collect data for FDA or other regulatory approvals, or to help to promote the use of their drugs at the optimal point of sale); investment by medical device companies (usually to collect data for FDA or other regulatory approvals; encourage the aggressive use of their equipment by professional staff, and to outshine [via "generosity"] competitors in their market); third-party reimbursement (payments for procedures from either insurance companies or from Medicaid and other notoriously wasteful government-run enterprises).
As these money sources dry up with a beseiged economy, and as hospitals are rapidly losing their profit margins due to a neoplastic proliferation of poor management practices, the few "surviving hospitals" may be doing an increased amount of sophisticated maneuvering (this actually brings to mind the dishonorably demised Enron Corporation and its co-conspiring auditors, the late Arthur Anderson & Company) which will, of course, adversely impact the quality of patient care.
This year, U.S. employers have reported that their healthcare insurance costs for covered employees have increased 8.3% since the passage of ObamaCare. It has been projected by the pundits that the insurance companies (who are seldom denied an increase in premium rates if they offer any explanation at all), bracing for the nation of covering an increasing population of formerly "ineligible" employees and their family members, are going to be kicking premiums up by another 18% to 22% by the end of 2011. Of course, these costs will be passed along to employers (who will not be able to employ as many full-time individuals as they might otherwise have), the poor and unemployed (who will be required, by law to have health insurance), and the providers of healthcare, who will have to be a bit more clever in terms of coding procedures for reimbursement, and who may have to be a good deal more creative (not meant in a positive way) in diagnosing, testing and treating patients.
Of course, the insurance companies, long engaged in the corporate practice of medicine, will dictate to the doctors and the hospitals which procedures are "necessary" and which are "not," as well as how long a patient should remain in the hospital until he or she is miraculously (or otherwise) sufficiently healed or rehabilitated to head back to work at the quarry.
Ultimately, all of the money required to save US hospitals from their current (and steepening) financial problems will have to come from the patients and the taxpayers-at-large. Procedures will increase in expense; premiums will increase in expense; patient care will suffer.
The industry that might benefit is Destination Healthcare, an arrangement where a specialized company helps a patient (or that patient's caregiver) to locate a suitable practitioner, in a suitable hospital in a country outside of the US (for example, China, Taiwan, Singapore, India, etcetera) where the procedure can be performed at comparable or better quality than in the US, but at a much lower price. That's right -- as money gets tighter in the US, and as having significant medical procedures performed becomes an increasingly wide and short road to personal insolvency, I would project a significant increase in the visibility, activity and profitability of these specialized destination healthcare firms.
Healthcare, as in the case of too many things, has now become a commodity, and price-shopping is going to be on the rise as consumers (patients) become a bit better-educated and less prone to victimization at the hands of a healthcare system that is all too often putting the Oath of Hippocrates aside in order to sustain profits through an unspoken "Oath Of Hippocrisy."
Faithfully,
Douglas Castle
Tags, Labels and Titles: Destination Healthcare, ObamaCare, healthcare insurance premiums, fiscal crises in hospitals, the decline in the quality and availability of US healthcare, healthcare as a commodity, the decline in the quality of patient care, insurance companies engaged in the corporate practice of medicine, fiscal mismanagement of healthcare providers and hospitals, healthcare alternatives, rising healthcare costs, declining healthcare quality.
Douglas Castle
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