Medical Freedom and the Free Market Healthcare Option

Medical freedom:?My opinion, a free-market healthcare system drives clinical excellence, innovation, value in cost, and quality. Programs are safer, and the patient experience, better.

Why? After 25 + years in healthcare as a nurse up to a CEO of major hospitals and executive for major health systems, I have lived my life working extraordinary free market teams in healthcare. These organizations drive Centers of Excellence. Inspired hospitals and physician groups competing for patients who have a choice of where to go for care, know that value ,(cost and quality), drives market share. The best patient experience, the best service, lowest length-of-stay, highest quality of programs built on a foundation of excellence, benefit the patient.

As a hospital CEO my program costs were always lower where this free market approach to clinical innovation existed. These savings allowed me to invest in the best staff, continuous training for them, new technology, and equipment for the Centers of Excellence. I have also seen advances in medicine, technology and therapeutics spurred by the innovation possible of a free market enterprise. The number of inventions I've personally know of in my lifetime alone by physicians and other health entrepreneurs from implants to monitoring devices, wearables to IT solutions to new surgical techniques have benefitted us all. Hospitals have invented solutions to very complex issues from the best Stroke Programs to Trauma Programs. Innovations by entrepreneurs!

I have led hospitals with Centers of Excellence in services like Neurosurgery, Bariatrics, Orthopedic, Cardiac, Stroke Centers of Excellence, to Oncology Centers of Excellence. I have led physician organizations as well, and worked with primary care organizations. I have worked with academic centers, non-profits, and for-profit organizations. A common thread in the best-of-the-best is notable. Where there is a free-market approach there has been a consistent them of inspired interdisciplinary teams with entrepreneurial hospital and physician leaders that relentlessly pursue excellence. They hold each other accountable and focus on excellence. Value comes in reduced length-of-stay, decreased readmissions, mitigation of known complications through best practices, even hospital avoidance overall. More importantly, they hold themselves most accountable to the patients experience of care and outcomes.

These programs, collaborating with the patient’s pre-intervention, to providing the education and structured resources they will need for post discharge simply have better outcomes. A focus on pain management, post-op nausea reduction and patient satisfaction is always there. The goal is always the best clinical outcome. It is not just physician practices, hospitals, and surgery centers. The free-market approach has seen the rise of extraordinary advances in post-acute care as well. Exceptional programs in behavioral health services to physical rehabilitation, as well as in both short-term, long-term care, to hospice and home care have come from the free market. Even free market accrediting bodies that credential these programs and challenge entities across the nation to meet or exceed ever increasing standards of excellence, came from the free market and make us all better.

Is the free-market perfect? Of course not. Price transparency for example is a complex issue. With the implementation of the ACA, we have seen a push down and frontloading of out-of-pocket costs to patients and families. Reimbursement is bureaucratic and complex. However, when you or someone in your family needs brain surgery, orthopedic surgery, cancer care and emergency medicine I would want you, and frankly my children, in their future, to have the best clinical care there can be. It is my opinion to be medically free we must preserve the option for a free market approach to healthcare.

This is my opinion only, it’s a perspective based on the stark contrast of ?two models of care, from a life lived as a ?nurse, a hospital CEO and health system executive over my adult career, versus the experiences of care I’ve participated in as ?the daughter of a Pearl Harbor Veteran now deceased, and of a Army veteran with injury, still actively receiving care. ?I would want for our Veterans and all of us a future where the best care is possible, always. Choice and medical freedom require therefore lend to this free-market option I have seen in action my entire life. I will fight to keep big government from eliminating a free market option in our healthcare system and fight for our medical freedom for us all.