For a while when watching or listening to discussions about reforming health-care there seemed to be two main points of view.
[ol]
[li]We should change our system to be more in line with European countries and Canada.[/li][li]We should find some other way to reform the system.[/li][/ol]
Point of view number 1 seems to have dominated the health-care reform discussion, but I’m curious about if any of you have other ways you’d like to see the health-care system be reformed.
As for me, I’m on the fence about going the way of Europe and Canada. I’m slightly in favor, but I have too many concerns and, to me, there’s too many complexities for me to fully embrace it, but yet I don’t like our current system.
I have three things that I would like to see changed.
[ol]
[li]Stop forcing insurance companies to pay for prescriptions or procedures that aren’t medically necessary (what is or isn’t necessary can be subjective, I know) like Viagra for example. In my opinion, this needlessly raises costs for the consumer.[/li][li]Tort reform. It’s commonly stated, and true in my opinion, that we are a very litigious society. I also have heard it mentioned many times how doctors and hospitals will run a bunch of needless tests on patients to prevent law suits. Again, in my opinion, this needlessly raises costs.[/li][li]And finally, what will probably be my most controversial statement, get rid of rejecting people with pre-existing conditions. Unlike the other two suggestions this would probably raise rates, but in opinion it wouldn’t be needlessly. The whole point of insurance now-a-days is that going to the doctor on a regular basis, buying prescriptions on a regular basis, and having to go to the hospital is just too expensive for the average person if they don’t have insurance, and I do agree with the UHC people that a person or family shouldn’t have to go into financial ruin in order to protect their health.[/li][/ol]
So, if there are any of you who would like to see change, but not go to UHC, or single payer system, or anything like that, how would you like to see the health-care system change?
I had an idea I thought even the GOP would support.
Build more hospital rooms, train more doctors & nurses, subsidize tuitions heavily. (To that we can add forgiving old loans of present doctors to cut the amount of money they pay in a month.) More supply means more availability & better care; & the price of care stops going up.
We know how to do pork & construction, this is easy.
I’ve always thought we should have more doctors and less double-booking that goes on, but I’ve heard that one of the reasons doctors double-book is to pay off student loans more quickly.
If we did what you say it would solve that problem, but then you would probably have other groups demanding heavy subsidies claiming that they’re just as important and…
Yeah, I’m making a slippery slope argument, and while sometimes it’s a silly argument to make, at other times it’s completely valid.
De-link employment from insurance, by removing the subsidy that we give to only employer-provided health insurance. (This is, by the way, something that McCain campaigned on.)
I kind of remember that, but forget the details of how that would work. One of the benefits of employer based health-care is that you’re accepted even if you have a preexisting condition, so like I said in the OP, we would need to stop the practice of denying coverage for preexisting conditions.
Also, I forget how this would get paid for. Individual coverage varies depending on the insurance company, location, plan, etc… but I usually hear the low end at around $500/month and the high end is double that or more. For some people that’s doable. For the rest of us, even the low end is too expensive.
One of the reasons the cost of training doctors and nurses is so high is that they are restricted by guilds (e.g. state licensing boards, influenced by the AMA).
Why not let anybody who wants to practice medicine? Patients could choose whether or not to go to a licensed doctor or not. That would increase supply without forcing taxpayer resources into an artificially-constrained pipeline controlled by the guilds.
And it would kill a lot of people, which is no doubt the point. The desperate who can’t afford a real doctor would go to your fake doctors and die from it. And you being a libertarian will naturally blame them for not being medical experts who can personally evaluate whether or not a doctor is qualified.