Have you ever gone online trying to assess health insurance products? There is no universal template that all insurers are required to complete to allow head-to-head product comparison. As such, it takes days to make partial comparisons and you are frequently asked a significant number of personal questions. The whole process is very invasive, challenging and inexpedient. Moreover, you are also obliged to independently determine the veracity and reliability of the claims about services provided by the insurer, a monumental task. However, if you are finally able to get insured, its now time to see a physician.

Health care service delivery by very large regional medical groups and service provider panels developed by insurance companies often results in significant losses of medical practice autonomy by individual clinicians. Primary care physicians are those most significantly affected. Practice content, style, setting and numerous other elements are increasingly so impaired that there is an escalating shortage of physicians in many areas of the country. Physician assistants and nurse practitioners are frequently substituted in these understaffed regions because the cost per provider to the systems and insurers is lower and such fits organizational budgets.

Head to head, when all of these practitioners were undergraduates, you can bet that the women and men now functioning as physicians academically outperformed their nursing and physician assistant peers. However, some of our governments, insurers and medical groups pursuing cost-containment will foist upon us the suggestion that there is comparable quality of knowledge, experience and care to be received via all of these clinicians. Moreover, they will use phrases like “as good as” or “delivered with increased sensitivity” while maintaining or increasing premiums and costs of ongoing services. If you do not demand the products and services for which you pay, don’t be surprised if in the future a “health care assistant” reading a computer algorithm supported by an insurance adjuster’s treatment guideline becomes your medical provider.

Additionally, new pharmacists are graduating from schools around the nation. Depending upon their degrees, Masters or Doctorate in Pharmacy, the students have just completed six to eight years of rigorous scientific training in combined undergraduate and graduate studies. A successful pharmacist needs to be knowledgeable in pharmaceutical biochemistry, physiology, computer science, small business management, and the multiple elements of insurance and health delivery systems. However, as health care delivery system models change and local drug stores become satellites of large chains, a greater number of lesser trained pharmacy technicians are being networked with a single regional pharmacist to lower the cost of product delivery.

So, now that you have fought through the maze of health insurance acquisition, I hope that it pays for a physician and pharmacist. Maybe you need to hire an agent.

Patient choice is a permutation of the theory of microeconomics that relates medical service preferences to service demand curves. The link between personal preferences, use of medical services, and the demand curve is one of the most complex relations in economics. Implicitly, economists assume that anything purchased will be consumed, unless the purchase is for integration into production. Of course, most medical care expenditures are not made for production except for those made by medical businesses. Preferences are the desires by each individual for the use of medical services or goods and services.

We can make life easy for our bodies and minds to live and function or we may challenge our bodies by the way we live. A person who is in a state of ease should not be stressed, fatigued, and dysfunctional, in pain, overweight or otherwise often mechanically, physiologically, chemically, or mentally characterized by other than normal status. The prefix “dis” is defined by absence of, opposite of, deprived of, or removed. As such, living with dis-ease/disease is life with a body and/or mind that is absent of, or not in a state of ease.