Dave Pollard has a long post about the necessary reform of health care, which is worth reading in full, here we only repost two explicit paragraphs on the emerging P2P alternative:

“The significant new ‘ingredient’ in the bottom chart, the Health Info ClearingHouse, is an example of what I have called a peer-to-peer information exchange. The ClearingHouse would be largely Internet-based (though also accessible through other media), not-for-profit, and not owned or controlled by anyone. It would aggregate and objectively assess health information provided by everyone in the system — customers (patients), doctors and other health-care providers, pharma companies, regulators and other government bodies etc. It would allow us to second-guess the hype we’re getting from for-profit providers and bureaucracies, get second opinions, and form support groups and share information and resources with other customers dealing with the same ailments.

Under this system, as in most countries today other than the US, Big Pharma would no longer be able to ‘push’ its drugs through the mass media (“despite these 147 side-effects, ask your doctor if new overpriced toxic XanthamPlus is right for you!”) nor would it be able to bribe doctors with ‘incentives’ to prescribe its brands.

The other big change would be in the relationship between doctors and other health-care providers and their customers (mere ‘patients’ no longer). The new relationship would be a continuous one, with factual information (data about customers’ health, analysis reports, new medical reports, etc.) being transmitted continuously between the customer and the health-care provider (perhaps even, as in some places in Japan now, automatically and electronically). The three-way information flows between customers, health-care providers and the ClearingHouse would enable the establishment of a co-developed ongoing personal program for every individual that would include (a) activities to prevent illnesses from occurring, (b) activities to self-diagnose illnesses in their very early stages, and (c) activities to treat illnesses when they occur. These would be joint activities with the customer actively engaged in the process.

Such a system is almost a no-brainer: it would generally result in a healthier populace and much lower costs to the system. But its evolution has been, and will continue to be, blocked by the special interests who would lose out in such a system: Big Pharma would find less need and market for its products, and its influence in the system would be drastically reduced. The HMOs, of course, would be out of business. Many of the lawyers who make their living on both sides of patient-health-care-provider litigation would also be out of business, since along with greater control over their own health, customers would also have to accept more responsibility, and not be able to hide behind ignorance and helplessness when suing doctors and drug companies. Doctors with God-complexes would not handle such a system well. Predatory snake-oil and wonder-therapy ‘alternative’ health-care providers would find themselves exposed by the ClearingHouse. “