Editor’s Note: A visitor to our website asked a question worth sharing:
It appears that this “Payer Organization” has a lot of power. In Capitalism, the consumer is the final arbiter of value. This seems to work pretty well to me. Who decides what is of value in Copiosis?
This question comes up a lot, particularly regarding the Payer Organization. The short answer is, it doesn’t matter who judges value so long as the people involved feel the judgment is fair. We explain more in the next question below.
Followup question: As an alternative health practitioner, I would be devastated if I were forced into the allopathic medical construct just because the Payer Organization says that modern medicine is the only thing of value. (or that the food pyramid is valid) I know from experience that love, compassion, belief and many of nature’s own gifts work far better than most drugs. (Not that there isn’t a place for allopathic medicine – if that floats your boat) What happens to things that don’t fit the “mold”?
The interesting thing about where your passions lie is this: despite the dominance of allopathic regimes, you still find it worthwhile to invest your time and energy doing work in the world you believe is valuable, even though you may not ever earn what your allopathic fellow practitioners earn.
What’s interesting about our society today is the complexity of the opinion-verse. There are so many people out there who share the same opinion of almost whatever example you give. One of the reasons one wellness modality prevails over others (allopathy vs. “alternative”) is because of our system: in our system even modalities must compete for a slice of the limited pie Traditional Capitalism creates. The reality is, there’s no reason why all modalities can’t be offered and allow the person being treated to choose. People think they are free to choose today, but that is not the case. Western medicine (allopathy) dominates the healthcare space. It is relatively difficult (even with the Internet) to get reliable information on alternative medicine. Mainstream medicine doesn’t equate it as equal to allopathy. What’s more, allopathy has stronger lobbies, more money and more powerful allies (such as the pharmaceutical and insurance industries) to make sure you spend your healthcare dollars in their modalities. There’s a lot more that can be said about how uneven the playing field is for allopathy vs. alternative medicine. It’s so uneven that alternative practitioners constantly find themselves resisting being “forced into a mold.”
In Copiosis there is no “mold” because there’s no one putting pressure on anyone to fit in any kind of mold. There’s no financial pressure, there’s no political pressure, there’s no federal government (or any government) pressure. There’s just the desire you have to follow your bliss. Provided that your bliss makes other people’s lives better, you get paid. Period.
The Payer Organization is a cross-section of the population made up of millions of people. It is bound to include many retired and not-retired alternative medicine practitioners. So your views on alternative medicine will be represented within the Payer Organization.
What’s more – and more important – is the Payer Organization doesn’t care about modalities. It looks at results. And it doesn’t pay the Producer (in this case the healthcare provider) until the result shows up. So there’s no need for the Payer Organization to pay an allopath differently from a natural or alternative medicine practitioner unless the two approaches produce different results regarding benefits – consequences (the Net Benefit* calculation).
We know that allopathy is problematic in many ways. It’s prevalence in society generally is due more to politics and lobbies than its effectiveness. Healthcare as practiced today is highly reactive, not proactive, it’s expensive and often causes more problems than it solves; It’s also extremely resource-wasteful.
Such practices in Copiosis would not earn as much as other modalities that keep people well in the first place and do so with minimal resource consumption. The only arena where I could see allopathy earn more in Copiosis than alternative medicine might be if a human is critically wounded – such as in battlefield conditions, a car accident or any other circumstance where the body experiences extreme trauma such as a loss of limb or damage to internal organs which require surgery. Wellness practices (proactive and alternative modalities that keep people healthy so there is no illness to treat) are much more valuable for society and individuals seen from the perspective of benefits – consequences.
The food pyramid is a great example of politics influencing health care/wellness. In a Copiosis Economy, things like the food pyramid, how it was created and why it persists are impossible, because:
- There’s no law-making body
- A lobbyist can’t lobby for them because organizations can’t own money, and
- An individual can’t pay them to create laws in his favor either: because money can’t be transferred from one person to another. Even if such a law exists, you don’t have to follow them if you don’t want to.
But most importantly, there’s no incentive for businesses to dominate in Copiosis the way they are encouraged to in Traditional/Crony Capitalism a.k.a. Corporatism.
Last question: If something has been of value to one person, but then causes another person harm (such as many allopathic drugs do), how is that handled?
By value here, you mean, an allopathic drug has value to the maker in terms of making money, but harms people who take it. Is that right? Or maybe you mean the drug helps some people, but harms others? We’ll try to answer both questions at the same time.
Today, value is separated from consequences. This is true about nearly everything. So a drug maker can make a lot of money well before the full effects of the drug is known. If the drug turns out to be crap or worse, the drug maker still ends up keeping all the “value” (money) they made prior to that discovery. Even more money can be made if they can conceal the crappy nature of the drug. The longer they can conceal problems, the better it is for them in terms of income potential.
In Copiosis, a drug maker doesn’t earn a dime until the results are known. So they can’t earn “ill-gotten gains”. Now, there are drugs that work for some people, but not for others. In those cases, we are getting into very specific detail for how the Net Benefit calculation is performed. We don’t have those details yet, but the principles upon which they will be determined remain consistent:
- Income is always realized only after the facts are known
- Income is based on actual results produced – (resources consumed + negative consequences)
- Customer value has some input, but that input is small.
In Copiosis economies, even allopathic drugs improve, because how much a drug manufacturer gets paid is based on the results derived, not the arbitrary and subjective criterion of “value”. So drug makers get better at what they create, because how much they earn is tied to actual results produced.
*Net Benefit = Overall Benefit – Negative Consequences