Free market healthcare is the process that enables buyers (consumers) of healthcare services to connect directly with sellers (providers) for cash price care. On the other hand, healthcare consumerism refers to the mechanism whereby individuals obtain free market care.
Digital healthcare
Digital healthcare is the fusion of digital technology with healthcare. Digital health comes with many potential benefits for the consumer:
- Convenience
- Frictionless experience
- Online scheduling, payments, prescription refills and test results
- Monitoring and self care devices
- Less waiting time.
- Cuts administrative costs.
Barriers to digital health and free market medical care
By far, the biggest barriers to digital health and free market healthcare are the many burdensome State and Federal laws favoring the health insurance industry. These self-serving laws are in urgent need of revision to favor digital health and consumer-directed care. Additionally, many of the HIPAA laws are in need of review so that patients and customers are not constrained by laws pretending to protect them.
Healthcare consumerism
Healthcare consumerism is already working in the cosmetics, infertility and weight-loss arenas since the insurance industry is not usually involved in these sectors. Because patients and doctors connect directly here in a free market cash price system there has been a stabilization or a lowering of costs for these services. In contrast, insurance-based healthcare is severely troubled by a lack of market forces and annual cost increases.
Benefits of free market healthcare for consumers
Under the current model for healthcare consumers are shackled by insurance-based pricing and rules. Additionally, patients often spend much more time filling out paperwork about their healthplan and waiting than getting quality face-to-face time with providers. The many benefits of free market healthcare include:
- No confusing, one-sided health plan contracts
- No junk health plans
- No bait and switch games
- No controlling middlemen
- No inefficient, costly administrative services
- No artificial insurance-based pricing
- No artificial insurance-based rules
- No annual price hikes
- No copays, deductibles, pre-existing and non-covered services
- No narrow provider networks
- No surprise bills
- No silly open enrollment periods
- Cuts healthcare fraud
- As-needed care
- You get to budget and manage your care
- Your body, your rules
Benefits of free market healthcare for employers
Healthcare costs are out of control with a market size now at a whopping $3.6 trillion dollars. One third of this market is wasted on inefficient administrative services trying to control mostly routine care. In fact, two thirds of all the healthcare delivered is generally affordable routine office-based or outpatient and should not be under the control of the health insurance industry. Because of crippling insurance-based pricing and rules many small business owners (like large companies) have chosen to self-insure.
- Encourages employers and employees to seek providers offering cost-transparent pricing, particularly for bundled services
- Encourages the adoption of healthy lifestyle choices by employees
- Bypasses the bloated and inefficient insurance-based pricing and rules
- Helps promote market forces and cost-containment in healthcare
Benefits of free market healthcare for providers
Most doctors sign one-sided health plan contracts in order to gain access to patients. As a consequence, providers have had to establish a costly practice management infrastructure in order to see patients controlled by health plans. Not only have these onerous rules and inefficiencies driven physician overhead to 70 percent but the insurance industry rewards providers with delayed and arbitrarily discounted payments. With free market care providers get the following benefits:
- No insurance-based pricing or rules
- No one-sided contracts
- No profiteering middlemen
- No non-medical intermediary gatekeepers determining authorizations for care
- No referrals or authorizations are necessary
- No complex coding requirements
- No compulsory EMR
- No claims filing or claims challenges
- No discounted and delayed payments
- No payment clawbacks
- Lower overhead
- Better margins
- Fast payments
Visit www.HEALTHdrum.com Come join our healthcare community and discover how consumer-directed, self pay care can save you a bundle of money and put healthcare control back in your hands.
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Written by HEALTHdrum