Health Attention For All

Everybody Lives

Or

Health Attention For All

By William Bunker

This is charity. It is good to give aid to those sitting at the gate, to provide for others from what you have left over. Serve others as you serve God. Love your neighbor as yourself. All humans will need medical attention in their lives. Because of the high level of specialization and expense of medical care, and the uncertain interval at which it will be needed, it is wise to divide this expense among everyone. So even in stark capitalism we see insurance companies.

However, insurance companies alone cannot adequately mediate the cost of health insurance in an uneven economy. State healthcare as well seems to be an inadequate system in the face of long lines and quotas.

As a member of the healthcare industry, I have watched healthcare copayments increase substantially and coverage decrease and controls on healthcare products tighten. Healthcare costs are using up a larger and larger portion of available income and increasing the cost of living at the expense of livlihood. If we are able to mediate this expense for one another, we have the duty to do so.

A majority of healthcare expense comes from assisted living and long term care facilities. A large amount of healthcare expense comes from normal inpatient hospital functions, as well as outpatient services, which cause the need for the majority of healthcare service infrastructure. A small but substantial portion of healthcare expense comes from prescription medications. This cost also can hit certain individuals very hard, such as diabetics and those on maintenance medications.

Numerous measures can be taken to reduce the cost and increase the service of these institutions. To reduce the largest expense of long term care, we can improve the communication ability of patients who rely on others. Instead of retirement communities, seniors can use webcams to correspond with family members and caretakers, extend their ability to live independently, and to request assistance when needed. Live-in caretakers can perform webcam checkups on numerous patients in their own homes instead of physically remaining in the home of one or a few patients. Some patients will still and always need personal long term care, but the costs associated with medicine can be reduced with the webcam.

This can be duplicated in the hospital. Some medical concerns can be addressed over a webcam, and doctors can order tests be performed at local clinics or at a location convenient to the patient. The results can then be faxed or emailed to the primary care physician’s office. If a physician feels closer examination is necessary, a personal interview can be scheduled.

Doctors can likely interview a patient with rudimentary concerns in less time than an office visit requires and patients with decreased mobility and compromised immune systems can correspond with their doctor more easily. This provides better care for more varieties of medical need, but it also will reduce disease communicability and reduce inconvenience of commutes, reception, checking in, waiting in a room for 20 minutes, and then being seen. All non-medical steps from commute to commute, other than testing network connectivity and ID verification, can be skipped.

Providing a federal patient database can help reduce expense in American pharmacies. If the state or federal government maintained a privacy protected medical profile, individual chains and insurers would be better able to interact with patients and distribution pharmacies and hospitals could have more transparent billing departments. Billing and insurance arrangement use a substantial portion of time and expertise that institutions must provide. This could be replaced by purer medical service and lower patient wait times and cost of service if patients could arrange insurance or billing with their company, the company with the database, and each pharmacy or hospital interact with the database. Institutions would not need to keep or maintain private databases, reducing overhead and keystrokes.

We can reduce the cost of medicine by helping pharmaceutical companies regulate prices of drugs. The high and rising cost of drugs and the increment of ‘maintenance’ drug therapy can be addressed by allowing free trade of medicine through international standardization of medicine and reducing the terms of chemical copyrights. Eliminating direct to patient medical advertising is a good first step. The better route is to educate doctors and to eliminate drug company payouts to doctors for prescribing their medication. That money and the advertising dollars are tacked on to the patient’s bills, plus ~15%, increasing insurance premiums as well as direct expense.

Finally we can reduce medical expense by building more medical facilities in time for the onset of baby boom retirement, and reforming our professional licensure routes for medical care providers. Trading mandatory degree programs and technical courses for required results on extended licensure exams, graded internships, and well structured continuing education we can increase the availability and reduce the expense of medical licensure and education, as well as shoehorn open our society’s ability to produce medical professionals, providing suitable medical care for an increasing number of patients and lowering the overhead of the medical institution.

Beyond these effective measures, we can decrease causes of illness by reducing global pollution. Replacing nuclear and coal power plants with hydrogen energy from bacterial photosynthesis [www.newscientist.com], civic-scale fuel cells and concentrating solar power plants will improve air and water quality and regional mood. Powering vehicles with biodiesel, fuel cells, and hybridized compressed air motors will eliminate the great majority of carcinogenic and disease linked hydrocarbon emissions, and the fuel cycles will actually *reduce* the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

When our agricultural system grows less corn and more and different kinds of foods, international agriculture will improve. Too much corn artificially lowers the cost of food so international farming is no longer profitable, and places corn in slots where other foods should be used. Livestock all lived primarily on grass for millions of years, but now they are fed primarily on cheap corn. This makes them less healthy, requiring antibiotics and treatments, and increasing their body fat and reducing their level of healthful nutrients. This is passed on to higher consumers. Reducing deitary sugar, fat, and sodium and increasing listed portion size will improve health and social services.

These measures will substantially increase our ability to love one another.