Healthcare Guarantees

I needed a small break so I am dropping a few things from my head to paper (i.e., blog).

Wouldn’t it be nice to get guarantees in healthcare?  I was thinking about several that would be nice to have:

1. Pay one price and get unlimited fertility treatments until they were successful.  (BTW – I have a physician friend who did offer this based on data knowing that most people were successful after 2 attempts and selling it for the price of 2.x attempts.  As long as you don’t take customers that have health problems, you should be good.)
2. Pay one price to get diagnosed for a medical problem versus multiple office visits, numerous lab copays, and trying different medications.
3. Obesity plan of diet, exercise, and drugs that lost weight or you got your money back.
4. Quality guarantee (which I talked about before) on things like surgery which promise certain outcomes (or not getting some staph infection).

The key should be that we (consumers) don’t have to take risk (or only take calculated risks) when we make decisions that are presented to us by our care team and insurance company.  Healthcare is still not perfect, but it seems ridiculous when I talk to people that spend months trying to figure out what is wrong with them.  (Discovery Health had a scary story about a patient with lime disease on TV a few weeks ago.)