Jonathan Small & Senator Ervin Yen
Many policy issues will be considered by the Legislature during the 2015 session. No doubt health care will be a topic of discussion. As health care costs continue to grow and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) changes how people get medical care, everyone’s looking for policy reforms and innovations that can make acquiring high-quality health care a reality for more people.
While opinions on health care and the ACA differ, common-sense solutions should be supported. Health care policy reforms must be pursued. Many patients, doctors, employers and providers feel overwhelmed by the current system. Doctors and patients often express that they feel as if they’re just a number and not a name. They feel that in the typical health care model, costs continue to rise with no end in sight. They often feel that the health care system inappropriately at times involves a bureaucracy or a middleman that makes getting services needlessly complex and expensive.
Oklahoma is getting national attention for the growth of direct care arrangements. Direct care arrangements between doctors, patients and employers work similarly to many services consumers buy. In a direct care arrangement, the doctor provides a prospective patient with a set fee for monthly services or a one-time fee for a specific procedure. Doctors across the nation now offer family and primary care services for less than the cost of a phone bill per month and provide excellent care.
For one-time surgical procedures, direct care arrangements make the experience for the patient, doctor (and often the paying employer) more efficient, at a lower cost with higher quality.
Direct care arrangements are resulting in patients being able to trust that they’ll be affordably cared for, not just “covered.” Direct care arrangements facilitate and expand something patients and doctors both long for — a direct relationship with a doctor. Direct care arrangements provide affordable options with predictable costs. These arrangements often make the process of acquiring health care a simple and manageable experience, even removing inappropriate bureaucracy and the middleman when a go-between isn’t necessary.
Direct care arrangements also are freeing patients and even employers to better allocate resources for health insurance, stabilizing costs and letting consumers use health insurance when more appropriate or needed.
Given these outcomes, direct care arrangements should be encouraged. But some are attacking the patient-doctor relationship, asserting that direct care arrangements should be regulated by state insurance departments. This is absurd. Citizens are free to buy multiple goods and services without such exchanges being deemed as “insurance.” The direct purchase of medical services and products should be no different.
To protect the rights of doctors, patients, employers and other providers, lawmakers should provide statutory protections against direct care arrangements being deemed insurance. Let’s make sure Oklahomans are affordably cared for, not just “covered.
Yen, a cardiac anesthesiologist, represents District 40 in the Oklahoma Senate. He is a Republican. Small is executive vice president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a free-market think tank (www.ocpathink.org).
