It’s time for a new relationship with healthcare

I just read Colleen McGuire’s Insider Tips To Bringing Sexy Back In Healthcare. She makes some great points about how health insurance treats people like a bad boyfriend. It makes sense. People do feel hopeless about today’s healthcare. Think about the past several decades…

We were taken care of. We weren’t consumers of health care and insurance. We were submissive patients and claimants.

Best let the insurance company handle it. Let us negotiate with the doctors so you don’t have to worry about it.

Doctor knows best. Here’s a prescription/procedure/referral. You don’t need to look elsewhere. Just take this piece of paper and you’re all set.

We were left in the dark. We couldn’t see behind the screen that concealed the business of insurance and medicine. And we didn’t want to look. Too complicated. Too messy. But the mess that has been trickling out from behind the screen is now starting to ooze. (That bad healthcare boyfriend was royally mucking things up!)

We were intimidated for questioning. Prices and quality of care vary widely. Perhaps they always did, but today we can see more. Cost transparency websites and apps are springing up everywhere. Quality data is out there. (And speaking of bringing sexy back, any ideas on how we make those numbers relevant to real people?) When we hear that a mammogram costs a thousand dollars less at a facility down the block from the one we’ve always used… Of course we’re going to wonder about that! We’re spending more of “our own” money now and the urge to shop cannot be denied.

And that glimmer — at the intersection of curiosity and cash — signals a change on the horizon. Once burned by an abusive relationship with healthcare and insurance, we consumers will stop feeling like victims and break out to stronger place where we control the system and set the tone for the future.