Cure the Real Medical Health Care Disease

Preface: This is a copy of a real letter. Notice the date.

April 6, 1994

Mrs. Hillary Clinton
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Subject: Cure the Real Medical Health Care Disease

Dear Mrs. Clinton,

Imagine that you are a doctor. You get paid only when your patients are healthy. You do not get paid when they are diseased.

You are rewarded only if they become, and remain, healthy whether due to recommended life style changes, vitamins, or other health inducing activities, whatever proves to work. You are not rewarded when you and they engage in needless surgery, risky chemical therapies, or other therapies that do not prove to result in better health.

The new Hippocratic Oath should be, “A doctor does not charge patients when they are sick but only when they are well.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that if you only pay medical personnel when patients are sick, that the system then invites sickness. The incentives of the present medical establishment are completely the opposite of what they need to be to promote health. Only by reversing the incentive will health be promoted.

If doctors and other health care providers are paid only when they keep people healthy, instead of when they keep them sick, the cost of medical care will decrease dramatically and immediately, to rise as the general health of Americans increases. Americans will truly not mind paying doctors under these circumstances. The quality of medical care will, because of proper incentives, flourish.

The medical care crisis is yours to solve. By changing the incentives, instead of throwing more money at a failed system, you can not only solve the crisis, but usher in a new and enlightened era of medicine.

Sincerely yours,
/s/
The person now known as Beality

Cc: President Clinton
       Letters to the Editor, Washington Post
       Letters to the Editor, Los Angeles Times
       Letters to the Editor, Wall Street Journal
       The United States Surgeon General

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