Health Care Consumerism- a novel idea

Health care expert Regina Herzlinger, a Harvard Business School professor advocates consumer choice. In summary " consumer -driven health care" means: (Source National Post)

• create competition
• allow providor or supplier innovation
• provide information to consumers so that they can make informed decisions

That being said, she is the pioneer and leader in another, better solution -- one that could benefit either publicly run or privately run schemes. She calls it "consumer-driven health care" and it involves deploying market disciplines on the medical world.

In 1998, she launched a one-woman crusade, by organizing a high-level conference involving the country's most prominent health-care executives, to hoist her plan on to the public agenda. And it's starting to gain traction.
She defines the problem the same, no matter whether the system is managed by the private or public sector: The consumer is lost in the shuffle and the health care professionals have never had to fix their increasingly cumbersome, inefficient and expensive system.
In essence, she wants to do for the health care system what the big box stores have done for retailing.
She cites the fact that, between 1995 and 1999, 40% of the productivity gains in the United States were in the difficult sector of retailing due to economies of scale, specialization and other efficiencies, she said.
"This can happen in health-care services too. But it's against the grain of the health-care community to permit consumerism to flourish," she said in a recent interview. "Their mindset is they're smart and you're not."

She said there are three steps to drive down costs of any service or product: Create competition for services, which leads to innovation and productivity; allow suppliers to innovate; and provide information to consumers so they can make astute choices.