[p2p-research] p2p healthcare system?

[Kevin Carson]

> Curious, anything past basic primary care? Any hosptials, surgery centers,
> specialists doing similar things?

Not that I'm aware of.  But then the only two contract practice
systems I've seen in the press are the Muney system and another chain
in the Pacific NW (I forget the name).  I'm sure there are a lot of
other local examples I've never heard of.

Muney's clinic offers outpatient surgery (skin cancer, etc.), but
nothing that requires inpatient treatment.

I don't see why a larger system of clinics couldn't pool their efforts
to maintain a small hospital, though.  The fact that it was organized
on a flat-fee contract basis, and that they couldn't simply pass
everything on through cost-plus markup, would mean powerful incentives
to minimize cost rather than padding the bill.

The mainstream American healthcare system today, with its cost-plus
culture, has an incentive structure a lot like what Seymour Melman
describes in the military-industrial complex.  So they pour money down
ratholes when it comes to wasteful capital expenditures, expansions,
remodelling, etc., and administrative costs as well -- and then just
pass it on to the insurance companies by marking up a bag of saline
solution to $300, charging $10 for an aspirin, etc.  It's the same
accounting system that created the Pentagon contractors' $600 toilet
seat.  I've got a lot more about it here:
http://c4ss.org/content/2088

Come to think of it, David Beito's history of mutual insurance gives a
lot of examples of lodge practice or contract practice networks that
included lodge or mutual hospitals as part of the deal.  You might
want to check that out.  Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State:
Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 (Chapel Hill and
London:  UNC Press, 2000).

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html