Your Health Care - Your Choice!

H/T Hot Air

Newt’s six-point health-care reform

Newt's plan has a fatal flaw. It doesn't address the fact that the federal government has no business providing health insurance. None! The government is responsible for much of the rising costs of health care because of their draconian controls of the market. Medicare and Medicaid are disasters and both are nearing insolvency and yet we have a president who thinks the government needs even more control.

The next group of folks who need to get out of the insurance business are employers. Employer provided health insurance was nothing more than an attempt to get around wage and price controls after WW II. What good is insurance that disappears if you lose your job?

Let's just put together a simple example of what could happen if your employer is not mixed up in your health care. I'm going to use neat round figures because it's not the amount but the outcome we are discussing.

If an employer pays $10,000.00 per year for health insurance for an employee and no longer has to do that, we would hope he would give at least half of that to the employee as added pay. The employee takes his $5,000.00 and shops a free market and is able to get the coverage he wants for $2000.00 per year. He pockets an extra $3000.00 per year. He can use that money to purchase goods and services or he can save toward a house or other large purchase. Meantime the employer pockets an extra $5000.00 per year with which to expand his business and hire more employees. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Newt's first point is stopping the fraud within our current system. How about getting rid of the system? Trust me folks, when you have a government program, you have fraud.

One of my jobs was as a optician. I worked once for a private optometrist who accepted Medicaid, something few optometrists do because of the extremely low schedule of reimbursement. After the doc discovered that Medicaid paid $20.00 for a field test, every kid that came in for an exam had a field test. It is rare that a young child ever needs a field test but when the doctor is able to attend to a patient while the optician does a field test in another room, it's like free money.

I know $20.00 is not a lot of money. But do that five times per day and it's now $100.00. At the end of the month it's an extra $2000.00. Multiply that by the number of optometrists in the country and it suddenly becomes a fairly large chunk of change. I'm not picking on optometrists, nor am I accusing them all of fraud. This is just an example of the ways in which government- run health insurance is so vulnerable to fraud.

The next group of people that need to be out of the health care business are attorneys. Newt brings this point up in point 5 and has some good ideas, but the best idea is to make the losing party of the lawsuit pay. What we have now are doctors paying exorbitant amounts of money to protect themselves as do all other businesses vulnerable to law suits. The insurance company reaches a settlement, even if the doctor or business is in the right, because it is cheaper to do so than slog through the court system.

People who have been truly wronged need a legal avenue to obtain justice. But with the system we have now, frivolous lawsuits clog the courts and cost consumers an enormous amount of money. It is always the consumer who pays in the end. If the grocery store didn't have to protect itself against "slip and fall" scams, and doctors didn't have to practice defensive medicine, maybe that gallon of milk, or your health insurance premiums wouldn't be so high.

You see, this is about choice; your free choice to manage your own health care, not the government, not your employer. Why are we putting ourselves at the mercy of whatever the government or the employer decides we should have?


Newt's Plan

1. Stop Paying the Crooks. First, we must dramatically reduce healthcare fraud within our current healthcare system. Outright fraud — criminal activity — accounts for as much as 10 percent of all healthcare spending. That is more than $200 billion every year. Medicare alone could account for as much as $40 billion a year. (Read about our latest CHT Press book, Stop Paying the Crooks, edited by Jim Frogue.)
2. Move from a Paper-based to an Electronic Health System. As it stands now, it is simply impossible to keep up with fraud in a paper-based system. An electronic system would free tens of billions of dollars to be spent on investing on the kind of modern system that will transform healthcare. In addition, it would dramatically increase our ability to eliminate costly medical errors and to accelerate the adoption of new solutions and breakthroughs.
3. Tax Reform. The savings realized through very deliberately and very systematically eliminating fraud could be used to provide tax incentives and vouchers that would help cover those Americans who currently can’t afford coverage. In addition, we need to expand tax incentives for insurance provided by small employers and the self-employed. Finally, elimination of capital gains taxes for investments in health-solution companies can greatly impact the creation advancement of new solutions that create better health at lower cost.
4. Create a Health-Based Health System. In essence, we must create a system that focuses on improving individual health. The best way to accomplish this is to find out what solutions are actually working today that save lives and save money and then design public policy to encourage their widespread adoption. For example, according to the Dartmouth Health Atlas, if the 6,000 hospitals in the country provided the same standard of care of the Intermountain or Mayo health clinics, Medicare alone would save 30 percent of total spending every year. We need to make best practices the minimum practice. We need the federal government and other healthcare stakeholders to consistently migrate to best practices that ensure quality, safety and better outcomes.
5. Reform Our Health Justice System. Currently, the U.S. civil justice system is the most expensive in the world — about double the average cost in virtually every other industrialized nation. But for all of the money spent, our civil justice system neither effectively compensates persons injured from medical negligence nor encourages the elimination of medical errors. Because physicians fear malpractice suits, defensive medicine (redundant, wasteful treatment designed to avoid lawsuits, not treat the patient) has become pervasive. CHT is developing a number of bold health-justice reforms including a “safe harbor” for physicians who followed clinical best practices in the treatment of a patient. Visit CHT’s Health Justice project page to learn more.
6. Invest in Scientific Research and Breakthroughs. We must accelerate and focus national efforts, re-engineer care delivery, and ultimately prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and diabetes which are financially crippling our healthcare system.

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