Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Healthcare plays on people’s fear, vanity & self-righteousness; that's a deadly combination that politics can’t fix, and a formula for upward spiraling costs. Only adversarial relationships can contain costs so the goal is for healthcare to remain as Market Forces driven as possible, with both private and public options, while recognizing that it’s a natural monopoly, and that business goals are not the same as societal goals. With that in mind, here’s a short list of things that could be done to lower healthcare costs:

• The first step has got to be to force health providers to publicly list their prices. For example, post all-inclusive prices for surgery. Some facilities have been doing this for decades and it's been spectacularly successful, but runs into the insurance manipulation juggernaut.

• Eliminating State-by-State licensing would facilitate franchising and doctor availability.

• Start physician training right out of high school like other nations, no prerequisite undergraduate degree, which lowers the cost of education.

• No cap on medical Residencies. Currently, many aspiring doctors with M.D.s cannot practice because they can’t get a Residency.

• But do place caps on Medical Liability Awards; the States with caps have lower costs.

• Let Medicare negotiate prices. Right now, by law, they can't.

• And make Medicare an option for ACA insurance at its cost.

• Don’t let drug companies advertise. Only the U.S. and New Zealand allow drug advertising, which is 90% of the money the pharmaceutical companies spend; only a tiny fraction goes to R&D and manufacturing.

• And no public funding of “alternative” medicine, or any other quackery like chiropractic or acupuncture, which has been completely debunked using the same kind of scientific studies used to verify real medicine.

Finding solutions to the high cost of healthcare are easier than identifying the problems.