An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back

by Elisabeth Rosenthal

A business-friendly peculiarity of U.S. law means that the government bodies charged with the responsibility to ensure patient-centered healthcare cannot directly consider the pricing of treatments, medicines, or devices in their recommendations and deliberations.

Insist that makers of drugs and medical devices estimate a price point from the very start of the FDA application process.

Create a national body like the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) that is tasked with assessing the value of new drugs and treatments.

Switzerland’s market-based system permits the sale of only drugs that have been judged to be cost-effective and sets a maximum allowable price; pharmacists can charge whatever they want to beneath that ceiling

if doctors don’t prescribe treatments they consider overpriced, there is no market.

Health technology can be deployed for enormous patient good, but often all it offers up are useless, but profitable, services.

A universal, national program supported by taxpayer money might make more sense. All that information could be placed on a chip card to carry in a wallet, which could be scanned by each new provider. Or, as Jim McGroddy, a former IBM executive who has served on many healthcare boards, suggests, it could be stored in a national data collection system akin to a credit agency like Equifax. If a public agency kept records of all your medical encounters in a secure and searchable form, they could be made available to providers of your choosing.