Common sense up here in clear skies country tells us we are bumbling healthcare reform. Under-qualified senators and self-interested lobbyists are pressured by President Obama’s unrealistic deadline to choose between competing proposals from house and senate committees to expand healthcare coverage and cut costs. That process is a stupendously preposterous approach to disaster.

Consequently it was refreshing to hear Stuart Freed, M.D., a family doctor, who spoke recently at Wenatchee Rotary. Freed, medical director at Wenatchee Valley Medical Center, is talking with insurers, employers, health care providers, and regulators who want to experiment with healthcare solutions in Washington. They are qualified and committed. Why not pass legislation that empowers, and requires, his co-partners solve it their way?

Freed identifies three symptoms that convince him U.S. healthcare is sick. First, our system is twice as expensive as the next most medically modern country. We pay doctors for procedures and expensive technology, not for making patients well. Thirty-one percent of healthcare premiums for private or employer-based insurance pays in small part for profit, and most part for staff who build audit trails and comply with complex, changing reimbursement regulations.

The second symptom is that the U.S. ranks 21^st of 36 countries on quality of care scores. We score high on rescuing patients in intensive care, but score low on 17 scores related to preventative care. He believes both providers and patients should accept responsibility for those intolerable scores. I accept.

Finally, over 40 million people are uninsured, and are driving up costs without getting appropriate care. He treats those patients and pays for it himself. Last year his medical firm, of which he is an owner, paid $4.3 million to write off care for uninsured patients, up from $800,000 just four years ago. That’s unacceptable.

What are his remedies? First he supports paying for wellness, not procedures.  Second, we need to ensure people. A recent patient owes $80,000 because her employer-based insurer denied coverage for a pre-existing cancer. Bob Anderson, East Wenatchee, and a retired family doctor, believes a public option is needed to control private health care premiums.

Third, where possible, we need to change the lifestyles of seven percent of the people with diabetes, congestive heart failure, emphysema, coronary artery disease, and depression. They consume 70 percent of our health care costs. We need to incent family doctors to educate, motivate, and activate us for healthy lifestyles. Higher pay would attract more medical students because specialists currently three times as much.

Freed is cautiously optimistic that insurers, health care providers, employers, and consumer advocates in our state are willing to cooperate on ways to improve our healthcare. 

That makes me want legislation at the national level that gives those qualified problem solvers in all of our states the time and resources to develop workable systems. We could give them a deadline of 2011, or 2013, or whatever.

That legislation would enable our under-qualified and highly pressured congress to reform healthcare with a system that has been proven effective by the people who ensure us, treat us, and employ us.