Interesting turnaround of the “boycott” created by government health reform suppporters…those supportive of Mackey’s stance have now created a “buycott” movement.
Tea Party Buycott in Support of John Mackey and Whole Foods.
Dana Loesch of the St. Louis Tea Party explained that a Tea Party Buycott asks supporters to gather [in this case] at the Whole Foods store to show economic support. “We are asking supporters to do all their week’s grocery shopping that night. Most tea party supporters are not regular customers of Whole Foods, and we want to show our support for Mr. Mackey’s championship of free market health care reforms.”
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The world in general has shifted as the internet and accompanying data transparency has made communication and coordination easier across boundaries.
The view that a single entity is required to execute a given task is no longer a given in a world where smaller companies can use outsourced services to appear much larger and large companies outsource everything to smaller companies.
Take for example, Dell. Dell has become primarily an aggregator which allows customers to customize their computer primarily by giving them access to all the options in the supply chain through an easy-to-understand user interface and through the experience of running all communications through that one company’s brand.
Who are the aggregators in health care that help us similarly understand our choices and make appropriate selections? That entity does not exist today in the consumer world…it has been filled by payors in the employer world.
As we move to a world that increasingly must organize around the individual, who will be the aggregators that make health easy to understand for the consumer and allow them to make the best decisions for themselves?
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Posted by
Vijay Goel, M.D. |
Categories:
Uncategorized | Tagged:
Health care |
Apologies for the silence…its been an interesting start to the year.
As some of you know, I’ve taken a new role with the X PRIZE Foundation…they offered me an amazing role in designing a X PRIZE for healthcare– finding the market failure in the health sector that can best be solved by a competition for a $10M+ prize.
The mission is amazing…define a competition to showcase competitors that will definitively improve quality while reducing costs. The execution will be challenging– defining the appropriate scope of this particular prize where teams can clearly understand the start and finish lines and a clear winner can emerge.
At present, we’re looking to define the best space to start, so please let me know if you would like to share your insights on addressable issues that would make for a good competition.
HealthShoppr.com continues to grow…we’ve seen an amazing growth in massage therapists posting profiles over the past 6 weeks and look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of transparency and personalization in finding a best fit health professional.
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Image via WikipediaI’m excited to announce that HealthShoppr will be going live next week! As I’ve discussed with many of you, we currently don’t have a consumer-centered approach to finding and purchasing health services from health professionals.
HeathShoppr changes that dynamic by helping consumers “match” to best-fit healthcare professionals, based on the elements that they care about: reviews, available appointment times, experience, focus on specific issues, customization to meet the needs of specific populations, and clear prices.
We give our providers flexibility as well– they can charge the prices they feel are warranted for specific services and service levels– rewarding innovation in business models and encouraging the “focused factories” that allow for better orientation to specific needs.
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Congress overrode Pres. Bush’s veto on the Medicare bill, and so a 10.6% across the board Medicare fee cut is postponed for now. Note, this isn’t an inflation adjusted hold– physicians continue to lose money on Medicare patients as rates aren’t keeping up with inflation, but “budget neutral” requirements (e.g., pay for performance, more paperwork) will continue the need to add expenditures to the declining reimbursement. What this does is add further signal to anyone thinking about caring for our nation’s seniors in a primary care setting to get their head examined:
But Representative Jim McCrery, Republican of Louisiana, said the bill “just kicks the can down the road” and does not fix fundamental flaws in the formula for paying doctors. In 18 months, Mr. McCrery said, doctors will face a 20 percent cut in their Medicare payments.
So, as we stall auction programs to stop overpaying for wheelchairs and medical equipment, our primary care docs get yet another warning that the bleeding continues and at some point the ax will fall.
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Image via WikipediaWhile Medicare is busy guarding the front door, to ensure that no cognitive or primary preventive care is ever billed as useful time, top-down price setting has allowed our “nationalized” system for seniors to pay up to almost 2X the going rate for durable medical goods.
As related in the NYTimes, Congress has been setting the price for goods, and lobbying efforts have ensured that price is significantly higher than can be found elsewhere on the free market.
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