Transparency In Health Care

Transparency has been a big political issue of late.

Interestingly, one of the primary differences between standard insurance and the Medical Savings and Loan is transparency.

With standard insurance, policy holders place their health care resources into a mysterious insurance company. The policy holders receive health care, but never really get the straight scoop on the cost of the care.

If you lose your job and can't pay the elevated cobra premium, your access to health care and claims experience is gone. Vanished.

In the Medical Savings and Loan, policy holders get a full accounting of their medical expenses. Policy holders will have a savings account with money that they have at the ready to spend on care. They will own Loan Reserve Notes showing the funds lent from their account to other policy holders and they will have loan account showing any outstanding loans in their name.

This information can be used by policy holders for long term financial planning.

My goal with the Medical Savings and Loan is to create tools to empower policy holders. I would want to take the transparency one step further and create a full life cycle analysis program that would give policy holders a full view of the anticipated health care expenses associated with being a human being.

Empowering the individual is the first step to creating a healthy individual.

With standard insurance, policy holders pay a hefty premium to be part of an insurance pool. This design reduces the policy holder to dependency on the group. The internal decisionmaking process of the insurance firm is opaque.

The Medical Savings and Loan creates a set of tools to help individuals understand expecte health care expenses, and hopefully empowers the individual in handling these expenses.