Hey guys. This is part 3 of a breakdown of Tom Wood's e-book, "Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Health Care." In this part, I will be do a summary of Chapter 2. Click on this link to sign up for Tom Wood's email letters and he will send you a free copy of this e-Book http://tomwoods.com/freebooks/. Lets get to it...
Chapter 2 The World's Most Affordable Health Care - Here in the US? (with Dr. Josh Umbehr)
This chapter includes an interview that Tom Woods conducted on his podcast with Dr. Josh Umbehr. Dr Umbehr is a physician and the owner of http://atlas.md/, a direct care practice. The episode is 481 of The Tom Woods Show.
In this interview Dr. Umbehr describes how his practice works using methods from the "old days" going back to when patients worked directly with their doctor. Dr. Umbehr removed the middleman, the 3rd party payer, and structured his plans using a flat rate monthly fee similar to that of a gym. This membership includes unlimited home visits, work visits, office visits, and technology visits (email, texting, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, etc) that are made possible due to not being limited to what insurance companies will allow or pay for. Another benefit of this membership is NO Copays. All procedures (stitches, biopsies, joint injections, ultrasounds, bone scans, lung scans, urine tests, & minor surgical procedures) are included in the membership just like any piece of equipment is included in a gym membership.
Additional unique benefits of Atlas.MD memberships includes wholesale medication, labs, imaging, and pathology. By negotiating cash discounts, Atlas.MD is able to lower costs up to 95%. One example includes a recent blood work billing error. An input was accidentally entered into the computer billing system using the "insurance rate" quoting the price of blood work for $1,028. Once the input was changed to the "cash rate" the cost was $39- a 97% savings just by cutting out the insurance company. The same negotiations are done for medications. These methods could reduce the costs of people's health care by 80 to 90%. Dr. Umbehr states that all of these methods have been in place for the last 20 years, it just needs doctors willing to participate.
Dr. Umbehr goes on to state the reason that health care is broken today is due to bureaucratic red tape. Doing an actual blood test is not expensive and is quite routine. It's the delivery of care and the payment system that is expensive. We are using insurance the wrong way. What we need is a free-market system to drive down the costs and drive up the quality. Hospitals and doctors need to be transparent in their prices. Take out all the administrative burden, the duplication of cost, the waste and inefficiency.
Other methods to cut the costs of medications is to use generic in lieu of name-brand medicines. Dr. Umbehr is able to save his patients $263 for 30 pills of medication by using generic medicine that is just as effective as the name brand equivalent. He offers these medicines directly to his patients and he avoids using the "middle man." This helps remove administrative costs from insurance plans and he is adding value to his patients. if physicians had been doing this the whole time, we'd have a completely different health care system.
Tom Woods goes on to ask Dr. Umbehr on this thoughts about Bernie Sanders and politicians who state that the modern day problems of health care are due to capitalism. Dr. Umbehr replies by stating that roughly 53% of all health care dollars are paid for by the government in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and State Agencies. This is not a free market. Doctors who opt out of Medicare contracts with the government are penalized for doing so. Government is continually pulling out components of the free market and complicating it with their bureaucracy. Government intervention is not adding value, but rather adding a cost. You get all the love and attention of the DMV, with all the efficiency of the post office. With the rising costs associated with ACA, there will be pressure to incentivize people to look for more logical, more affordable, and more common sense options for insuring people with high-risk health care and for paying for the rest of their health care from doctors who practice insurance-free models like AtlasMD.
Well there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of Chapter 2. If you liked it please leave an upvote or comment, and feel free to share with this great community.
Take care and stay safe out there