| Today,
most American healthcare plans are provided through an assortment
of public and/or private legacy welfare systems that date back
to the golden age of GM and Bethlehem Steel. These unsustainably
expensive and distressingly ineffective programs have relied
largely upon ineffectual supply-side regulation of consumption:
to promote wellness and contain costs. |
| It
is widely believed that the next generation of wellness and
healthcare programs will, perforce, be built around greater
individual participation and free-market decisions and other
demand-side dynamics. Sadly, this new wave of Consumer-Driven
Healthcare Plans (CDHP) tends to be complex unfamiliar and otherwise
difficult for individuals to assimilate. As a result CDHP and
wellness, disease management, etc, program activation decisions
have been sluggish. |
| Meanwhile,
on another front, people are finding new ways to talk, to share
information, to network. There are already well over 70 million
blogs, double the number of less than a year ago and no let
up is in sight. There are over 150 million MySpace and FaceBook
pages collectively viewed over 4 billion times daily. Wikipedia
already has over 1.5 million community-authored entries. |
This
same amplified word-of-mouth is far more influential upon its participants
behavior than all manner of direct propositions, internal entreaties
and advertising web-based or otherwise.
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