Idea – Incentive Payments – Health Checkup
Why do we need incentive payments? How about the fact that 80 of the richest humans on the planet now own the same wealth as the lower half of humanity per Oxfam. A figure that continues to grow faster at an astounding rate. This is a dangerous imbalance of wealth and power.
We are experiencing all kinds of social problems among them the use of human slaves as describe so well in a documentary I so recently resteemed. (I even received an incentive payment in Steem for resteeming it so I know incentive payments can work.)
Here some details on an idea that I thought I would put out there as suggested by @thecryptofiend in the post on the ideas factory.
Getting Paid for a Health Checkup
I personally don’t like going to the doctor. I would rather be rolling around on the floor in pain than suffer another long conversation with the insurance company over unpaid health claims.
Most doctors and insurance companies seem to not feel the need to do anything until there is an obvious problem. I guess the medical professionals are overworked or there is some cash flow issues that make it so that health checkups are no longer prioritized.
It would seem to me that if things were caught earlier it would save a lot of both lives and expense. For example cancer is much easier to treat if it has not spread all over. So perhaps it would be a good incentive to actually pay people to get some health information and treatment in order for them to be healthy and thus save money in the long run.
A sunrise picture taken this morning with the Galaxy S7 and processed heavily
Why not pay people to get an annual physical and live a healthy lifestyle? For example, instead of a tax on cigarettes we could pay people who are non-smokers at their annual checkup. This would be a better incentive to stop smoking than a tax on cigarettes that just makes smokers mad. (I used to be a smoker and the price of smokes now would really piss me off. Actually natural tobacco I think is more healthy - not that I’m planning to take up the habit again.) If you know you could make $300 or more to stop smoking that might make you want to quit more. Going to your annual health exam could be an eagerly anticipated experience.
We could even go so far as paying for a certain number of massage therapy sessions to help people relax and deal the the stress of modern life. Stress plays a big role in making us sick, yet most of us can’t afford to pay for any of this type of luxury. By making a payment for us to go get a massage people could be employed and others would benefit as well.
How to fund it
Maybe ask the Canadians? ;) Health care seems like a pretty fundamental thing that a modern country should prioritize and find cash for. It seems like the cash is currently flowing primarily into the hands of a small minority of people at this point so I think we need to think about how a system wide change can happen so that funding can go to key areas where it is needed the most.
Health care should not result in a profit making situation imho. Big drug companies are jacking the price up on many key medications in a very inelastic market. For example the price of insulin in even older types of it has been going higher and higher. There is not much choice for the people who need these medications but to keep paying the increases.
In a way we are all paying for health care as a group anyway because most of us with any tangible assets can’t go without insurance and many people suffering from major health problems go bankrupt even with insurance. The insurance companies have to stay in business so these costs have to be collected by our payments.
I believe it would be good to start thinking of ways to keep people employed and pay for people to be healthy rather than cut out doctors, under pay and overwork them to save costs.
If a government funded or even a private insurance company could find a way to support a healthy lifestyle through payments like this I think it would be very popular. Plus changing a few different individual lifestyle choices could lead to significant quality of life improvements and long term savings for society.
Stay tuned for more ideas on incentive payments. Thanks for reading!