guthealthcare.com

If you have spent any time with the Understanding It section of this website, you'll agree that Quadrant III healthcare, based on covert rationing, is a lousy way to run a healthcare system. Not only is covert rationing harming millions of Americans - on both ends of the stethoscope - but it is also eroding the fundamental American principle of individual autonomy. It is doing all this without solving, or even slowing in any substantial way, the fiscal crisis that makes the rationing necessary in the first place. There has got to be a better way.

This section of the website provides a cursory exploration of what such a better way might look like and how we might achieve it. A much more comprehensive treatment of this topic can be found in my book, Fixing American Healthcare - Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

The following discussion presumes you've read the brief explanation I provide elsewhere on this website of the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare (GUTH).

In our brief summary of the GUTH, we saw that neither of the lower quadrants supports an equitable or sustainable healthcare system. This suggests that we ought to aspire to an upper-quadrant healthcare system, where high quality and transparency reign. Unfortunately, as soon as we begin to consider what a pure Quadrant II or Quadrant I healthcare system might look like and what it would take to get there, neither of those options appears to be feasible either.

A pure Quadrant II system is easy to dispense with right away. In Quadrant II, patients would pay for all of their own healthcare themselves, thereby regaining control over their own medical destiny. But such a scheme has been priced out of the realm of possibility. There aren't enough people who can fund their own healthcare, at least not when they become sick and actually have to use medical services.

On the other hand, a pure Quadrant I system, with a completely equitable, centralized system of open rationing, is equally difficult to visualize in the U.S. Other Western nations ration healthcare much more openly than we do, but the methods they use would be next to impossible to sell to Americans.

The bottom line is that we're going to have to devise a healthcare system that incorporates open rationing (from the First Corollary of the GUTH) but that is suitable for Americans. In trying to envision such a thing, I am going to suggest straddling Quadrant I and Quadrant II, with one foot in each quadrant. We can conceive of a healthcare system that preserves the best parts of Quadrant I and Quadrant II, while limiting many of the negative aspects of each, and that honors the worth of every individual.