It has been troubling to me that we have been discussing a major reform to healthcare without getting to the root of the problem.
First of all health insurance is not health care. Take me as an example. I have been gainfully employed for the past 30 years and had some form of health care coverage for that entire period. Fortunately I have been reasonably healthy and the the insurance companies that I paid premiums to are way ahead of the game if they compare the dollars I have paid in to the dollars they have spent to cover my health service needs. If I had saved those premiums in a health savings account then I would have those funds available to me for future health service needs. Due to the way the system works once I change healh insurance providers my "premium kitty" is gone and I start at zero. What if a portion of those premiums had gone to a "catastrophic" health service policy that would stay with me no matter where I buy insurance? This is just one example of a way we could lower halth insurance rates by taking the upper limits off the table.
Other ways to reduce the cost of healthcare are:
- Establish fair and equitable fees and rates for specific services. This way individuals could evaluate policies with much higher deductibles and pay for more services out of their own pocket than having the insurance companies pay for them. A big part of the inflated cost of services is that we don't see the bills and as long as somebody else is paying the tab we don't have an incentive to do so.
- Cut down on Medicare/Medicaid fraud. With all of the estimated abuses in this system we could budget 5-10% of the proposed savings in enforcement activities. Once we reign in the abuse the potential savings could be used to build and staff government clinics in the poorer/rural neighborhoods to delvier health services directly to those most in need.
- Reform the malpractice laws so doctors don't have to waste so much money on covering themselves in the event they make a mistake.
There are a lot of things that can be done before we move to the drastic steps being proposed by our current administration.