The solution is and always has been a four step regulation change:
1. Decouple heath insurance from employment. Make all heath care and health insurance related expenses tax deductible. Encourage businesses by keeping the tax benefit of the business providing a voucher and group status if it so choose to make some sort of health insurance or health payment voucher a part of an employee’s compensation. It would be more helpful to make the insurance payment part of the payment a tax credit, not just an income reduction.
2. Decouple Insurance from state regulations and allow nation wide policy groupings. Allow any interested groups to form insurance risk pools. Churches, benevolent societies, civic organizations and the like should all be allowed and encouraged to form health care groups. Make any group benefits contract fees tax deductible. I would personally love to have a Knights of Columbus National Health plan to turn to, there I would be sure that I wasn’t paying for services that I believe to be fundamentally wrong. Allow such organizations to build menu plans that will provide the type of coverage desired by the purchaser of the insurance.
3. Pass Transparency regulations for both health care providers and health insurance companies. All costs are published and known. All formulas for how compensations and repayments are published and known (no secret proprietary red-lining, zip code computations, or other gimmicks allowed…) If an insurance company will pay 20,000 for an appendectomy in New Jersey, it must publish that and how it came to that figure must be provided.
4. Tort Reform. Massive systemic tort reform is absolutely necessary before any change will “stick”. The costs that doctors pay for malpractice insurance are a huge portion of what they have to charge the patient. BTW, in the transparency requirements, it would be a good thing to hand the patient a bill that tells them how much they just paid for the doctor’s malpractice and liability insurance. (which is also weird to me because then a huge chunk of that cost gets paid by the insurance companies… it seems like tons of bureaucratic insanity to me… that once again increases costs.)
Once those four things are addressed, and the free market is in play (with reasonable regulations and modest help for those who have difficulty paying for insurance) The costs would begin to come down. Healthcare would become a private contract, once again… and government could butt out of what is definitely not any of its business.
r/John – TMF
