I’m hopeful they saw this coming? – Local health-care execs: Current system ‘dysfunctional’ – BizWest
Excerpts and comments:
Flanagan co-founded Nextera in 2011, which offers primary-care service to members for a monthly fee. “Insurance should be used for what all types of insurance is for — a catastrophe.”
Hallelujah, amen. Insurance works best, when it operates under the premise of providing coverage for an unexpected event. Running money through an insurance company, or any bureaucracy for day to day aches and pains is inefficient and always will be.
“We have a dysfunctional ecosystem,” Dr. Clint Flanagan, co-founder of Nextera Healthcare Inc., said of the current system. “We’ve lost that doctor-patient relationship.” He said more people are traveling to urgent-care and emergency rooms for the types of conditions that can be taken care of by a primary-care doctor.
“The problem is that there are fewer and fewer primary-care practices. Doctors have become employees of hospitals.”
Primary care doctors are treated poorly by the insurance system and Obamacare mandates. To many, the solution is to become an employee of a hospital group. In Boulder, the Boulder Community Hospital System has purchased many stand alone practices in the last few years. I don’t see how a high cost provider of healthcare, that is a hospital, buying up private practices is a positive for the consumer.
What surprises me is that more primary care doctors don’t elect to start a practice that operates outside of the insurance/hospital monopoly like Nextera does. Personally, I use Insight Primary Care, which I would recommend to Denver readers, or Boulderites who like to drive south or work in Denver. I believe there’s also a primary care doctor group in Longmont that operates outside “the system.”
Several roundtable participants shared personal experiences that left them feeling like victims of a system out of control.
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Gustav Hoyer, CEO of MyChoiceMD, a company that is working with physicians to shed light on pricing, said systemwide, “Patients don’t get treated like the customer. “How often do you go get a service, then get the cost later?” he asked. “Nobody can tell us how to fix this. … What we have now is a disaster.”
I can relate. Just recently we were driving back from picking up our daughter from a ballet intensive in Texas. She has had medical problems and was having “issues” the last week she was there. She has been a patient of Children’s Hospital in Aurora for the last 5 years. It was a weekend and we spoke with the doctor on call as we drove, and it was decided it was best for her/us to stop by the hospital and get some tests run. So she had a blood draw (twice because the first one caramelized) and a stool sample. Due to the blood draw complications, we were at Children’s for 4 hours, which was frankly ridiculous. What was even more ridiculous is the “list price” bill from the ER, over $6000. There was no surgery, no broken bones, no MRI’s or CT scans, no sophisticated procedures of any type, with the possible exception of the lab work, which I don’t believe is part of this bill. I have a hard time understanding the justification of a $6000 bill. It will be interesting to see how this bill gets adjudicated by the insurance company.
The general population needs to take responsibility for their own health care. Trusting the government to do it for you and do it efficiently, is trust misplaced.
