Back to the Days of Christopher Robin and One-Stop Medical Care

   As the nation turns its attention to the tax issue, I would have your ear on another matter: our health-care system.
   If only we would return our system to what it was between the 1900s and the 1940s, all might be well. While Republicans are searching for a replacement for Obamacare, I cannot help but wonder if the real answer lies in returning to the prepaid physician groups practiced in the first half of the last century.
   I get my information from Christy Ford Chapin, author of "Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System," and from an article she wrote more than a year ago for DailyMail.com.
   Health care was inexpensive in those days because doctors provided their own insurance. They practiced as a group of doctors, with perhaps only one general practitioner, but various specialties under the same roof. Besides the economic benefit, there was this organizational benefit, as well: The doctors could compare notes on patients, filling each other in on needs each were not familiar with since they were not part of his (or her) specialty. Doctors today tend to treat and prescribe within the blinders of their own specialty. Not so, then. Maladies were less likely to go overlooked as the malady in question did not receive all the attention. You received one-stop medical care that tended to be more comprehensive.
   The financial benefits? Being self-insured, the doctors damaged their own financial interests if they either over supplied or under supplied services. They would drain their profits if they overspent, but risk losing customers if they did not provide adequate services.
   If we are to leave our medical system in the hands of private enterprise, perhaps this model that we abandoned in favor of insurance is something we should return to. We should consider doing an about-face and abandon traditional insurance in favor of the old prepaid physician groups.
   The tricky part of this would be how to gradually dismantle our current insurance-based system. With 18 percent of our gross domestic product going to health-care today, and with so many employed in the insurance industry, you don't just tear it apart without risking severe economic trauma.

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3821750/Why-American-healthcare-expensive-efficient-world.html