Not as innovative as the headline made it sound.
It might be an interesting model to push all insurance work from the doctors to the patients. I think it may even have some benefits: people will actually know what they are paying for.
On the other hand, a little bit of work done by a lot of people vs. a lot of work being done by one office, the "crowdsourcing" sounds like a better solution. The obvious down side is that I have no leverage against the insurance company - a doctor's office does.
* "He watched doctors treat up to 40 patients a day". Is the article implying that is somehow bad in and of itself? If the doctor has staff to handle paper work, and doesn't travel to each patient, this seems to be more efficient. In economic terms, the doctor is maximizing his comparative advantage (treating patients)
* "It wasn't like this decades ago. ... there was so little overhead." What is the cause of this recent overhead? Certainly doctors had offices and staff decades ago, as they do now. Is it just the insurance part? If that's the case, then just simply perform fee-for-service; doctors are free to do that.
[1] http://support.formstack.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&i...
Lately, I've been doing a side job in which I transcribe focus groups for various businesses, including several large health insurance firms. I am consistently stunned at the money they spend on this, and the cynical nature of the questions they ask, and how completely unrelated they are to anything even resembling patient care. They just aren't concerned with patient care. They are concerned with developing "innovative insurance products" to compete with the supposedly "innovative" offerings from other health care conglomerates.
People don't want "innovative insurance products". They want affordable health care, provided by physicians who are not driven to distraction by the bureaucratic requirements of dealing with ten different insurers who are all trying to pay out as little as possible.
