The Role of Money in Health Care

My presentation on Health Care Reform takes about an hour to deliver.

I would love to make it shorter, but there are just so many annoying details involved in discussing health care that if I fail to address the issues, I feel that people will misunderstand the program.

The goal of the presentation is to create viable alternative to insurance. In the presentation, I present a mathematical model for the Medical Savings and Loan which replaces insurance with a combination of savings accounts, a loan reserve and grants.

The whole presentation is about the mathematics of funding health care & I spend a great deal of time talking about something called "money."

The problem I face is that people have crazy ideas about money. This is especially true in the health care industry.

The insurance industry is built on a strange notion that "pools of money" can provide health care.

In my presentation, I am forced to consume several minutes defining money.

I say that money is simply a tool that people use for measuring the cost of time and resources. The resources represented by money are far more important than the money itself. The most important resources in health care are time and human knowledge. The goal of a health care program is largely a matter of creating a mechanism that allows people to trade their time and resources in ways that improve care. Money is just a tool that we use to facilitate this trade.

The presentation needs to attack the notion that money is magic. Money is just a tool for measuring resources. Ultimately the resources behind the money matter more than the money. We developed a complex financial system that generates money out of thin air with Federal Reserve pushing the poison pill of debt financing. We've created a crazy financial system which is using strange mathematical formulas to undermine the wealth of the people.

I am caught in a trap. The Medical Savings and Loan is a mathematical formula to create an alternative to insurance. I am presenting this formula to challenge the formulas used by the insurance industry (and socialism for that matter).

In presenting my formula, it is fundamental for people to understand my view of money. I see money simply as a tool for measuring resources, while insurance is funded on magical ideas of money. The goal of my formula is to break the illusion that pools of money provide health care. In contrast the opposite happens. When we put our health resources in huge pools, we concentrate wealth and end up creating a society that needs artificial redistribution of resources to provide care.