The Hidden Crisis in Healthcare: Why Insurance Systems Reward Machines and Undervalue Human Healing

Across Europe, and especially in Switzerland, the healthcare landscape is undergoing a subtle but profound shift. Insurance companies increasingly rely on consulting firms to decide which services deserve reimbursement. On the surface this seems rational: only what is strongly evidence-based should be paid for. But in practice, this logic distorts what is truly valuable in the healthcare system.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the use of imaging. MRI scans, X-rays, CTs  these technical procedures are performed and reimbursed with unquestioned confidence, regardless of whether they change anything about a diagnosis or treatment. Machines inspire trust; they carry an aura of precision and objectivity. Technology is considered valuable almost by default.

Therapeutic work, however, tells a very different story. The moment a human being offers time, attention, touch, connection or communication, the system becomes skeptical. Therapies must be justified, defended, rationalized. Sessions are questioned. Intentions are doubted. Interventions are scrutinized. The underlying message is clear: what cannot be measured easily cannot be trusted fully.

This pattern aligns closely with what Saifedean Ammous describes in The Fiat Standard. In centrally controlled systems with tightening budgets and expanding bureaucracy, the value of human work is gradually diminished. Standardized, academic, machine-driven procedures rise in importance because they are easier to control and quantify. Trust in machines becomes cheap, while trust in humans becomes expensive. And yet healing still happens in the space between people, not in the codes and forms designed to categorize them.

Therapists experience this reality every day not because their work is less meaningful, but because it does not fit neatly into academic checklists or reimbursement structures. A conversation cannot be captured in a billing code. A grounded, calming presence cannot be described in a claims form. A moment of genuine connection resists quantification. And because of this, human work is often minimized or tightly regulated, while technological interventions pass untouched.

When instructors say that therapists must “reposition themselves,” they are pointing at this fundamental imbalance. The future of therapeutic professions will not be shaped by insurance companies or bureaucratic systems. It will be shaped by trust, real outcomes, human interaction, access, transparency and freedom of choice the things that have always mattered, and always will.

This is exactly where a new kind of space is emerging: a health space not regulated by centralized incentives but shaped by direct human connection. A space where the quality of the relationship matters more than the quality of the paperwork. Where therapists are not defined by codes but by their impact. And where patients choose not based on bureaucracy, but based on trust.

TheraMatch is born from this idea. Not as an opponent of the current system, but as an alternative to its limitations. It offers a place where therapists can work in integrity, where patients can choose freely, and where healing is not reduced to checklists but re-centered on human experience. By using Bitcoin as an open, global value-transfer system, TheraMatch enables fair, direct and borderless exchange without gatekeepers, pre-approvals or fiat-driven restrictions.

In a healthcare world that increasingly trusts machines and questions humans, we need a parallel path one that protects the essence of healing. TheraMatch represents this shift: decentralized, human-first, independent and rooted in real impact.

Healing has always existed between people. Everything else should support it — not control it.