Let’s not get confused or distracted by some common misnomers.  The terms Healthcare, Health Care and Health Insurance, as they are frequently used in the United States today, have little to do with Health and Care and much to do with Disease care, profit and the Business of Medicine.  As such, the best you can expect to get from “Health Insurance” is a high price, low value product that gives you limited access to a broken system and a very low return on your investment.  Virtually every Patient and Provider I speak with is well aware of and deeply troubled by these issues.  At Veritas Health Care, we are creating alternatives to business as usual in health and health care.  We are  Building Better Health Care through Patient-Physician Cooperation and Patient-Physician Cooperatives. 

We are a young organization, incorporated a bit over one year ago.  Despite our youth, we have

1. established a non profit corporation and

2. a website,

we are

3. expanding and supporting our community of people who care about health care,

4. we help members, friends and family members successfully navigate the troubled waters of the current system (no small feat) and

5. we work with caring institutions and members who care to use our StepWisely®™© Quality and Performance Tools to Promote and Generate Best Practices.

The big question remains: how do we go from where we are today to true health care?  How do we make alternatives available to Patients and Physicians and other Providers?  By continuing our work and by staying true to our mission to build better health care through our community, relationships and network.  Yes, it is true that we need to continue to build our membership, but that is insufficient.  What about building cooperatives?

The several structural steps underway must not distract us from patient need  and our need to get our heads together to figure how we can facilitate and enable development of  health, health care and disease care products and services.   People need health care, disease prevention and common disease care combined with high deductible catastrophic health insurance for those rare diseases that cost a fortune to treat.  We need to find a way to offer a practical hybrid that delivers on true health care … true comprehensive care … we need to find and build healing places and healing plans at sane prices.  A combination of self care, preventive care, primary care, health savings plans and catastrophic disease coverage through communities and cooperatives is the best bet in my book.  Let’s make it happen.

Next steps: Destination Cooperatives through Communities and Cooperation

Dr. Mike