How To Trick People Into Caring About Healthcare

a or bIn health policy circles (yes, those exist!), experts often refer to three aims for a modern healthcare system – to offer (1) universal access to (2) high quality medical care at (3) an affordable cost. Access, quality, and cost: a possibly unachievable set of goals, certainly in the U.S., where the quality of our care is decent (but uneven), while access to care and the high cost of our care compare dismally to almost every other developed country.
Suppose you were fixing the U.S. healthcare system and realized that increasing access to care would make it harder to control costs. Which of the three aims would you make your priority? I asked this question to a couple groups of people. One group came out strongly in favor of access, the other in favor of cost control. Can you guess who these two groups of people were?
I asked a group of undergrads at Duke to make the same guess. These undergraduates were taking my health policy course, and with that background were able to make some good guesses. Those prioritizing access: Some thought it might be a rural population with limited access to subspecialists. Others thought it might be a poor population with little access to health insurance. Those prioritizing costs: Some thought these might be fiscal conservatives, others thought they were large employers trying to hold down the cost of employee benefits. These were all really good guesses. Only one problem with them… (Read more and comment at Forbes)

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