The $5.00 copay killed healthcare.

These days you don’t need to look any further than the front desk of any medical office to find out who is really controlling your healthcare consumption, and it’s probably not you. Have you ever noticed that before they even ask “how are you” that your doctor’s staff has to request ‘permission’ from an insurance company?  They won’t even call until you produce the mandatory insurance card.

That’s not how I remember healthcare growing up. I remember having a doctor that treated us like family.  Anytime anybody got sick we just went to the doctor. We were treated exactly like consumers and paid a reasonable price for the visit.  

But then along came Blue Cross, and along with some pre-tax coercion (courtesy of the US government) and poof a 60 year health insurance boom was full steam ahead. At first they just covered the big-stuff, catastrophic care that people were afraid they couldn’t ever afford. By then these giant insurance companies came up with the brilliant-idea of ‘low copays’ for doctor visits. I recall paying as low as $10, or $15 for a specialist visit. Heck at those prices, who cares what health care really costs?  

The stealthy weapon used to commit the murder, was a simple low co-pay.   

Now literally everything goes through health insurance. If car insurance worked like this we would all probably be walking a lot more. It took years, but insurance has convinced our entire society that healthcare is just too complex and far too expensive to take any chances and not buy health insurance. It’s billed as the only true solution to our healthcare concerns.  

What’s that you say, you live a healthy life?  Even still they have you convinced, you’d be a complete fool to go without health insurance.  I felt the same way. We’ve been programmed to believe it’s mandatory.

But now that I've discovered pure membership based healthcare (Direct Primary Care) and medical cost sharing, I can't believe how much money I completely wasted believing in the insurance company myth.  

So congratulations to all you big health insurance people for getting away with murder all these years, and for turning our beautiful consumer driven health care system, into a fee for service sick-care system. But watch-out because membership based care is rapidly turning back the hands of time, one patient at a time.  It’s just like having a doctor in the family again, only this time with a cell phone!