Improving our Healthcare System

Opinion by Ravo Root IV, Cleveland, NY –

Currently, there is a major topic up for debate about our healthcare system and the ways in which it should run. Many Republicans believe we need to get rid of the Affordable Care Act or it should stay the same. Many Democrats say that our healthcare system should convert to single payer or a public option system. The things you usually don’t hear about are the details in which we can make healthcare a more affordable service and in the same breath not kill the industry.
One example is the QALY system which stands for Quality-adjusted life year. This is a system that determines the price of a drug by deciding how much a drug should cost based on a formula of Years of Life x Utility Value = #QALYs. The years of life, meaning how many years you live with the disease you are treating with said drug multiplied by how healthy you are on a scale level of 0.0-1.0. This will then determine the price of the drug by each unit of QALY’s. This method has been proven to work and is much better than healthcare CEO’s gouging working class Americans. In many other countries who use this system they see many drugs exponentially cheaper than those in America because of the QALY system. This system is non political and simply put it works.
Not only are we getting gutted by large healthcare conglomerates when it comes to the cost of drugs in which they can sell to us directly but we are also getting hurt when it comes to the cost of staying in a hospital. This is because of GPO’s (Group Purchasing Organizations) who are “Not-For-Profit” purchasing agencies that are supposed to lower the cost of drugs and equipment that hospitals purchase. While the system is in place to help the hospitals and the consumers who the GPO will be purchasing for, you would think the cost would go down. The answer to that is no, GPO’s do not help and they continue to award the large medical companies rather than any new innovative companies even if the new company has a better price and a better product. This then gives greater profit to large companies and limits small business growth within the medical supply market. This not only hurts our consumers pocketbooks but it also kills innovation in our hospitals along with the small businesses that could create so many good paying jobs for working class Americans. In the end, even if you are against medicare for all, a public option, or new advancements of Obamacare, don’t tell me there isn’t anything we can do to lessen the cost of healthcare for the family stretching pennies for their child dying of cancer.