Myth Busters: Why Health Reform Always Goes Awry

Paperback – March 23, 2017

by Greg Scandlen (Author)

Fifty years of attempts at reforming health care have failed. Not just failed to do what was promised, but actually made conditions worse than they were before.

As a result, we have a system that is extremely bureaucratic, inefficient, unaccountable, inconvenient, of questionable quality, and enormously expensive. We need to find a better way, and that involves putting the consumer/patient/taxpayer back in charge of their own resources and enables them to buy services according to their own sense of value.

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A fast and important read on health policy. If you are an interested layman who wants to have an informed opinion on how federal, state, and local governments should intervene in health care markets this is a must read. Yes, I wrote health care markets. One of the myths busted in this book is the frequent claim that health care is so special it fails to obey the laws of economics. Another is the absurd notion that paying for services rendered (“fee-for-service”) is what is wrong with US health care–even though people pay for services rendered in law, engineering, plumbing and car repair without problems. Mr. Scandlen clearly explains why the notion that fee-for-service payment is a problem is a myth, and shows how the substitutes for fee-for-service imposed by government have contributed to many of our current problems.

Mr. Scandlen shows how the other 29 myths he discusses have created similar havoc in health care. He explains why certain changes are necessary and why many politically popular ones are harmful. He draws on decades of experience in the health insurance industry to skewer academic nonsense and political pompousness with common sense and good humor, telling how he made the journey from working as a community organizer in the Maine Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a Ralph Nader group, to one of the most respected health care policy analysts in the country.

How can one not enjoy a book that skewers population health nonsense by reviewing an academic article result with the observation that “the authors smugly assume that by adjusting for age, sex, race, and illness, they have eliminated any population differences that might contribute to different courses of treatment. Golly, might there be anything else that distinguishes people in New York City from people in Ogden, Utah, or Minot, North Dakota that might cause one population to be treated differently at the end of their lives? Let’s put on our thinking caps and noodle on this really, really hard.”

There is, as Mr. Scandlen trenchantly observes, “something about health care that makes even sensible people lose their grip.”

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Medical Myths originate when someone else pays the medical bills.

Myths disappear when Patients pay Appropriate Deductibles and Co-payments on Every Service.