Information Driven Health Care

The goal of the Medical Savings and Loan is to restore the principle of self funded health care.

It is impossible to self-fund health care without good information about health care costs.

In a day when health care is dominated by big insurance companies. People hoping to self fund their care need to have a professional negotiator on their side to negotiate prices.

So, the first step to creating the Medical Savings and Loan is to start creating an infrastructure that allowed people to share and distribute health information.

To run the network, I created a position called the Health Care Advocate whose primary job is to record information on people's health experience, then to use this information to help people set up a structured savings plan.

If I found a group of people interested in pursuing the Medical Savings and Loan as an alternative to insurance, the people involved in the effort would find out that more work needs to go into creating this massively distributed network than in setting up the savings accounts.

The primary difference between the Medical Savings and Loan and Insurance is one of focus.

Insurance attempts to fund individual consumption with group resources. In this system, people pay into a group pool. The insurance industry then built a vast centralized information network around the pool.

The MS&L seeks to fund individual consumption through a widely distributed network of individual accounts.

To make the system work, you need a massively distributed network to share health care information.

Changing from a system of centralized group pools to individual accounts changes the focus of the information from the internal bureaucracy to the needs of the patient.

Anyway, the Medical Savings and Loan would be a really fun information project. That could be started the second that someone asks me to come and speak with their group.