Thorley Winston:
My preference for health care financing reform (since no one is really not talking about health care reform) starts with:
a) Give consumers who buy health insurance the same tax breaks as employers who buy health insurance for their employees (no fines or mandates) or make all health care costs fully tax-deductible. I’m not a fan of employer-based health insurance but most people are satisfied with but I think we can at least give those in the personal health insurance market the same tax treatment.
b) Allow consumers and employers to buy health insurance policies across State lines like we can for life insurance, auto insurance, and every other legal good and service (if you want competition, that’s the way to do it).
c) Remove barriers to allow small businesses and other organizations to form Association Health Plans (about 60% of uninsured Americans work for small businesses).
d) Encourage high-deductible policies that cover catastrophic illnesses and Health Savings Accounts. These policies tend to have lower premiums (which make them more affordable especially for younger and lower income people) and we can start to develop a more robust market (along with price signals) for routine care costs instead of having them covered by third-party payers.
e) Automatically enroll those who are eligible for Medicaid in Medicaid (about 25% of uninsured Americans are those who are eligible for Medicaid but don’t enroll until they need to see a doctor).
f) For the poor who don’t qualify for existing programs and/or for people with preexisting conditions for whom it is still cost-prohibitive to buy health insurance, let the States experiment with targeted subsidies or creating insurance pools for these individuals.
g) Give doctors who provide unreimbursed care a tax deduction or tax credit for charity care.
I haven’t addressed several issues like medical malpractice reform and Medicare reform (both of which I think we desperately need in our country) because I think they’re volatile enough that they need to be addressed separately. I also think we need to (on the health care side of things) look FDA reform for drug and device approval, increasing the number of doctors in the country and/or the ability of other trained medical personnel like nurses and physicians assistances to provide services, health IT reform, wellness clinics, etc. All of these are important and distinct enough that I think they can and should be addressed separately instead of being thrown into a thousand plus page bill that sinks under its own weight.
Full text at: http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/09/political_theory.php#comments
No comments:
Post a Comment