Marketing Research Blog

The current administration’s primary goals for Health Care Reform were to make it both less expensive and available to everyone. But they failed miserably on both counts. We were assured time-after-time that the Health Care bill would decrease our national defecit. But just a month or so after the President signed the bill, the government tells us  that Health Care Reform “reform” will increase the deficit-not lower it. And, still, not everybody is covered. I won’t even address the job losses that will result when the “bill” is completely implemented.

Reducing cost of health care and insuring everyone would have simple. The problen is that neither congress nor the administration addressed the root causes of the high costs. Had they only taken a look at the health care trends that are clearly portrayed in the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States–which has been updated each and every year for a couple hundred years.

In the late 1990’s, I was invited to make a presentation at a Health Care Research Conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Since I love to ski, I immediately accepted. As a marketing research director of a multi-line insurer, I had no idea what aspects of health care I would address at the conference. But I quickly discovered the health care trends that have long been reported by the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States. 

Based upon my analysis on the health care trends that had been reported in the Statistical Abstract for all to see, I prepared a paper entitled “Holding the Line on Health Care Costs” which was published in the Conference Proceeding as well as in a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal . The trends were all up-more office visits, more specialists, more procedures, and more reliance on third-party payors.

The conclusion that I drew from the treads I observed was that  costs were up because patients had no direct personal responsibility for paying the bills since someone else was paying them, that is, that patients were no longer making traditional consumer buying decisions when it came to health care.

The solution that I envisioned encouraged folks to once again make consumer-buying decisions. I recommended that we don’t purchase comprehensive medical insurance covering everything-rather that we use a small portion of that money to buy a very high deductible major medical policy and put the remainder in a health care account that could be used for health (or for whatever else they  wished). Some years after the conference, I was with my wife when her physician prescribed an MRI for her. When I asked the price of the MRI, neither he nor his staff knew-since no one had ever asked. Had my my recommendation have been implemented, patients would have asked because they would have had to pay for it out of their own account. So you don’t think that I am hard-hearted to ask the price of my wife’s MRI (I would willingly pay any price of my wife’s well being). Just minutes after I asked the price question, my wife learned what an MRI entailed and said “I can’t get into that tube.” Before the physician had prescribed the MRI, he already had administered a corisone injection. Upon hearing of her reluctance to get into the MRI chamber, he said “if the cortisone doesn’t do the job, we’ll figure some way for her to get the MRI.” As it turned out, the corisone did the trick. But he had prescribed a very expensive test that was unnecessary.

What does all this have to do with Health Care Reform? Instead of having a comprehensive health insurance policy, those currently carrying health insurance could spend a small portion of that price on a, high deductible, major medical policy with the rest of the money going into a health care fund–which would be used for health care costs or anything else the patient chose. For folks who lack the funds to purhase the policy and create the health care account, we the tax payers will cover it.

The net result would be that health care costs would drop even though every one was covered.

Most people who run businesses are acutely aware of the Blitzkrieg-like attack against the principles on which this nation was founded. What’s happening is akin to what we see in aviation from time-to-time, controlled flight into terrain. It appears as though our leadership is purposely flying this nation into the ground. 

While things now look bad, I am absolutely certain that the American people are about to change our nation’s course from the disastrous direction in which we are heading to that which our founders envisioned in our Constitution.

In the meantime, do we wait for this redirection of our country to occur before taking action to grow our businesses? Absolutely not! This is the time to charge ahead—when the timid won’t. Yes, Virginia, businesses still can thrive!

That’s what I do–help businesses grow and thrive.  I have no interest whatsoever to merely helping them survive. Several years ago, I had a conversation with an experienced banking executive who had just become the CEO of a start-up banking enterprise that realistically had the potential to rapidly become a major, profitable, player in the market. Our conversation was about how I could help him position the bank to profitably realize it’s potential. Among other things, I asked the CEO this simple question “Would you be happy with a loan officer who never made a bad loan?” When he responded with a “yes,” I knew that he was risk adverse and, consequently, it neither surprised me that he didn’t contract with me to help him grow his business nor that a decade later that business has barely tapped its vast potential.

A couple years ago on a Sunday afternoon, I emailed the CEO’s of the top 25 advertising agencies and claimed that I could identify those minor changes in positioning that would greatly increase a brand’s share and well as those minor changes which should be assiduously avoided because  they would hurt share. The note said something like “Many ad agency executives will think that this simple psychologist is  ’delusional’ to even imagine that he could possibly help an agency grow a client’s share; but I also said that a few may think that I am ‘crazy like fox’ and would give me a call. That’s just what happened that very evening– one of the CEO’s reached out to me.

I can help you seriously grow a client’s share. Just  contact me!  Then judge for yourself whether I’m ‘maniacal’ or ‘crazy as a fox.’