The Leaky Bucket
The Leaky Bucket No matter how much water you pour in, as long as you don't fix the hole, it will never fill up. As a concerned citizen watching how our tax dollars are spent, that is exactly what I see happening right now in California's Medi-Cal system. The biggest weakness in this system is the lack of transparency. When you go to a clinic, you never get an itemized bill in your hand. You never see how much was charged in your name. The system operates in the dark, and that opacity is the real problem. Clinics can use patients to bill the government, while patients have no way of knowing what was actually claimed—it’s kept completely out of sight. On top of that, clinics refer patients back and forth to each other, repeating blood tests over and over, whether necessary or not. Worse yet, they rarely take the time to clearly explain the test results to patients or what those results mean for their health. A simple rule could change a lot of this: every test should come with a...