Many states require insurance to pay for seeing chiropractors. A few cover marriage counseling, and a handful reimburse for massage therapy. Increasingly, health experts rely on the political system to decide what should be reimbursable by insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid. The results haven't been promising for the expanding definition of care.
After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.