Little town of McAllen, Texas is now famous for being the second most expensive Healthcare town with the least household income. Medicare paying $15,000 per enrollee in 2006 and average income being 12,000 per capita. But even this doesn’t buy the best quality of care, the town suffers from full spectrum of chronic diseases that the whole country is struggling with. This was reported in a well written article in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande.

This article has become a ‘must read’ in the White House, reports The New York Times, as the President summoned his aides to discuss the little town in Texas. It is great to witness the sensitivity of Washington and the political will to fix the current overwhelming healthcare system.

I am writing this blog as a physician who is concerned about the Healthcare order in the country and would like to participate in the Healthcare reform. I have been working actively to innovate a simple solution that addresses a big part of the puzzle, mainly the healthcare cost. After many years of research and experience of being the first face of medicine, aka Primary Care Provider, I have come to the conclusion that there are 3 main reasons of rising the healthcare cost:

1. Lack of an open healthcare market- because of third party payer or Insurance industry, ‘the patient’ doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the price of the test, hence doesn’t question the need and the cost of the test. This leads to over utilization of tests and treatments, complications and disparity of costs of same tests/treatments.
2. Poor care in the End of Life - over utilization of expensive medical tests and treatments for patients who only want to pass away respectfully at home. Data shows 95% patients want to die at home but 75% of patients die in healthcare institutions.
3. Unnecessary Medical law suits- leading to defensive medical practice that causes unnecessary testing and treatments and also leads to rising overheads for the physicians.

HealDeal addresses the first problem by removing the middleman - i.e. insurance industry. This online platform connects the patient directly to the Doctor to get a price information for a medical service, this helps the patient to manage and stretch their healthcare dollars, and that forces the cost disparity to resolve and fair market competition to happen. This way the doctor also participates in improving access to healthcare for the uninsured patients.

Archana Dubey, MD

To be a consumer market, you obviously need price information. People know the prices for health insurance [and have seen them rise at a shocking 20% per year for 5 years] but not for diagnosis or procedures. Many people don’t even know the difference between a diagnosis and a procedure.

Some people will tell you this is because health care is so complicated, but that argument doesn’t really make sense. Computers are very complicated but people still shop based on price and quality to find value. People don’t even understand the details of how computers work but they still shop on price that’s to companies like Dell.

Why can’t the purchase of health care services work the same way? It can if we let it and it’s starting to happen. We are seeing announcements almost weekly of public and private organizations offering pricing information from CMS to health plans to retail clinics to startups. The most recent news is the state of California’s launch of a web tool to compare prices for surgeries (www.oshpd.ca.gov).

HealDeal was founded on price transparency and is excited to see how this growing trend can enable consumerism to transform the health care system. Stay tuned…