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