Cure Health Care

Situation: Is Our Health Care System Terminal?

Americans’ health care system is at a transformational stage. Our system is mixed of public, private and third-party payment. With health care spending approaching two trillion dollars, our government spends as much as the private sector. But while Americans are dearly paying for health care under the “hybrid system” Americans receive relatively little direct patient care. The remainder is largely wasted upon an inefficient, bureaucratic system or lost to outright fraud. Clearly our health care system is ill; but is our health care system terminal?

The haphazard system did not foresee the following exacerbating factors which would compound the problem until it reached its present critical mass: America’s Industrial-Welfare state model of governance would one day be challenged by globalization; the massive “Baby Boom” generation would be living longer than any previous generation in human history; and the expansion of federal regulations and tort law would combine to restrict the expansion of health care providers and services.

Thus have we reached the tipping point: our health care crisis will continue until the government socializes medicine and smothers all Americans; or a modernized, patient-centered, consumer-driven health care system serves all Americans.

Solution: Cure Health Care

In the current “hybrid system” of public and private third-party payments for health care, patients and providers are anesthetized as to the true cost of health care. Combined with demographic pressures, this increases the demand for health care. Exacerbating the crisis, demographic pressures, government intervention and litigation further constrain the supply of health care. If supply continues to constrict and demand continues to rise, the cycle of cost increases will continue unabated. To avoid government-run medicine and, instead, attain patient-centered heath care, we must cure health care based upon the law of supply and demand as it pertains to patients, providers, and third-party payers:

Patients

* Empower patients – give them information, choice and control in their health care, especially their choice of physicians and pharmacists
* Make Americans’ health care expenses fully tax deductible
* Provide incentives to encourage a healthy lifestyle
* Enhance existing Health Savings Accounts
* Enhance information technology to build and manage health care databases so patients can speedily and easily access them
* Promote voluntary, timely, and transparent quality reporting of health providers and third-party payers’ costs

* Expand Federally Qualify Health Clinics (FQHC) and Project Navigator to help the uninsured access to preventative and non-emergency health care, and control their own wellness
* Establish “virtual clinics” – health centers without walls that provide the uninsured an FQHC card for use at participating providers who are not FQHCs
* Give patients information about price, quality and cost, including data detailing complications and/or infection rates
* Ban dangerous medicines manufactured or counterfeited in and imported from nations ignoring or violating safety standards and intellectual property laws

Providers

* Insure a workforce of health care professionals by increasing support for health care education, faculty, and institutions
* Enhance tuition grants and student loans for student doctors and nurses working with underserved populations
* Enhance tax relief for doctors, nurses, and all health care providers working and volunteering in underserved populations in areas of high medical need
* Expand aid to rural and urban hospitals for strengthened residency programs and adequate staffing in critical shortage health facilities
* Reimburse fully and fairly health care providers serving Medicaid and Medicare patients
* Implement a research and development tax credit to encourage the development of new medicines, new treatments, and new technologies, and speed their delivery to patients
* Protect American medical innovators’ intellectual property and their patents
* Reform liability laws to put the interests of patients before those of trial lawyers
* Stop punishing good deeds by establishing a safe harbor from unjust lawsuits for “Good Samaritans” and community organizations for the good faith provision of charitable care for the indigent and victims of national emergencies
* Eliminate the bureaucratic red-tape that cheats patients out of the care they need

Third Party Payers: Private

* Allow Association Health Plans, so that employers can combine their health care benefits and get the purchasing power of a much larger pool
* Empower employers and individuals to purchase health care across state lines
* Pass tax relief for costs incurred in providing employees personal preventative health maintenance benefits
* Devise a uniform, affordable, basic, and understandable private insurance benefits package containing an essential level of primary care, as well as dental and mental health services; this must be marketable to a segment of the uninsured, such that they can afford it

Third Party Payers: Public

* MAKE CERTAIN THAT HEALTH CARE IS PATIENT-CENTERED RATHER THAN GOVERNMENT DICTATED
* Oppose mandates upon private health care providers that only impede competition and, thereby, escalate the costs and limit the choices of patients
* Emphasize insurance, emphasize access, and emphasize preventative medicine within Medicare and Medicaid
* Establish a rational, comprehensive, and accounting of the uninsured, so their needs may be fully and fairly assessed and addressed
* Continue to be the payer of last resort for catastrophic health care
* Trust the market to make the correct decisions, but protect patients and providers from private instances of waste, fraud, and abuse

Restoration: Paient-Centered Medicine

Focusing on bureaucrat-centered health care, the Left’s radical aim is to socialize one-sixth of our economy and foist a third-party payment system over Americans through massive taxation, wealth redistribution, regulation, and rationing. The result will be less medicine for more money. As the noted political-economist P.J. O’Rourke dryly opined: “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”

Our wellness in the new millennium is best served and enhanced by patient-centered, modern medicine that empowers Americans with independence, information, choice, and control. This reform requires injecting free-market forces into public and private health insurance programs to maximize choice and minimize costs. Such transformational change won’t be easy; but, if must take our medicine, the cure for what ails the best health care system in the world is simply at hand.