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There are very few within or outside of the American healthcare system who would argue that the current system of providing healthcare is badly broken and needs fixing. The cost of healthcare has outpaced every other sector of American life. We spend 2.5 times more on healthcare than do most developed countries in the world. Do we have the best healthcare in the world? The average life expectancy is 78.49 years, which ranks us 51st in the world. We spend more on healthcare than any other nation but get less for our hard-earned dollars. This article will provide suggestions for repairing the broken healthcare system with excerpts taken from the book Practical Wisdom, by Dr. Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe.
KEY WORDS: Affordable Care Act, ACA, Obamacare, healthcare system, Clinton Global Initiative, changing behaviors, incentives.
Few within or outside the American healthcare system would disagree that the current system of providing healthcare is badly broken and needs fixing. The cost of healthcare has outpaced every other sector of American life. We spend 2.5 times more on healthcare than do most developed countries in the world. Do we have the best healthcare in the world? The average life expectancy is 78.49 years, which ranks us 51st in the world. We spend more on healthcare than any other nation but get less for our hard-earned dollars. For this article, I interviewed Dr. Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College and the coauthor of Practical Wisdom,1 which he coauthored with Ken Sharpe, who has provided us with suggestions for repairing the broken healthcare system.
When the system is broken, one contemporary solution is to give people more rules to follow. This means society does not trust you, and someone is always looking over your shoulder. An example is the concept of defensive medicine. Doctors are penalized for not following the rules-rules that often require doctors to perform or order tests when prudence and common sense tells them otherwise. For example, a man comes to the emergency room with head trauma. He was not rendered unconscious; he is oriented to person, time, and place; and his neurologic examination is intact. Does he need a CT of his head? Probably not. Yet billions of dollars are spent each...