Posted on 02/20/2017 7:03:22 AM PST by Kaslin
Republicans agree that Obamacare has failed and must be repealed. But they can’t agree on the replacement “plan.”
The one thing they shouldn’t do is devise another grand scheme like the Obama “plan.” The answer is not a new and better big government “plan.” Instead, the president and Congress should take specific actions to free the market so patients and providers can create a health care system that serves everyone.
When President Barack Obama proposed his federal takeover of the healthcare system, he was right about one thing: American medical care was a mess. Government provided half the funding, created incentives for cost-plus care, and pushed insurance onto employers. While care cost more than it should for many, some people didn’t have access to the treatment they needed.
But instead of seeking to empower patients by giving them greater control over their own futures and more opportunities to find the best care possible in the marketplace, the president and Democrats in Congress took medical decisions away from the public and transferred them to Washington.
Unsurprisingly, that approach didn’t work. Insurers, mandated to discard actuarial principles in order to cover patients with serious pre-existing conditions, were forced to offer one-size-fits-all policies to cover everything from falling hair to sex change procedures. No wonder the cost of health insurance spiked. People got stuck paying for “benefits” they didn’t want.
Washington’s coverage mandates forced companies to cancel health insurance plans that employees had relied on for years. Patients were lucky to find replacements, and usually ended up paying a lot more for a lot less. Having coverage did not mean having access to care.
Young, healthy people who were supposed to sign up in greater numbers and pay a lot more to subsidize their well-off elders, understandably chose not to do so.
Insurance companies were stuck serving a sicker population, causing them to lose money and drop plans. The promises of Obamacare proved to be false.
Republicans correctly believe the misguided law must be repealed. But what to replace it with, they ask.
The answer is nothing. At least, not in the sense of another comprehensive government program to set insurance requirements, mandate coverage, fix outcomes, and the like. Misguided government intervention created the health care mess we’ve got. It’s time we allow economic incentives and free market principles to solve the problem.
The solution is to free the market to innovate and experiment, to find the best way to provide quality coverage for less cost. For example, health insurers should have a national marketplace. Let people buy medical plans across state lines like every other kind of insurance. And bar states from imposing special interest coverage mandates that raise health insurance premiums for everyone.
Moreover, employees, not employers, should control their health insurance coverage. After all, none of us expects our company to buy us homeowners or auto insurance. The tax deduction could be shifted to individuals from businesses, or eliminated entirely with an equivalent individual income tax cut. Tax-free contributions to health savings accounts would enable people to finance the level of risk they’d be comfortable with.
The market today doesn’t have the flexibility to offer an answer, so government must get out of the way and encourage the private sector to do so. Those of limited means could be subsidized through vouchers to purchase their own private insurance. State high-risk pools could provide access to care for people with chronic or pre-existing conditions.
Medicaid needs to focus on the poor who have nowhere else to turn. Reform should emphasize allowing the states to provide better care for their most needy citizens without interference or mandates from Washington. States that do the best job will serve as models for others. Doctors who reject Washington’s cut-rate reimbursement rates need to be encouraged to re-enter the Medicare and Medicaid patient markets.
None of these measures constitutes a “plan” as such. Instead they each address a particular problem. In some cases they eliminate regulatory and tax barriers. In others they repair bad government incentives. In some instances they reward employers and providers of care to fill health care gaps.
The emphasis should be on addressing the individual problems in a coordinated manner. A workable reform requires targeted fixes designed to work interdependently, instead of one big “plan” requiring so many political compromises and tradeoffs that it would be doomed from the start.
It’s particularly important to get the principles and language right. We need to change the way policymakers think. Centralized government solutions don’t work regardless of who designs them.
We also need to change people’s expectations. The government should be the backstop for those without other options, not the protector of first resort.
The disaster called Obamacare provides an important reminder that we ignore at our peril. It is a fact that even the most well-intentioned programs designed by politicians and run by federal bureaucrats do not work. We can’t afford to ignore the lessons we’ve learned.
Instead, we need to restore and build on market principles that we know work, emphasizing the pragmatic over the ideological, and adapting to reality, not the world we wish existed.
People are suffering, so Congress needs to “fix” health care now. But not by repeating Obamacare’s ham-handed approach. Instead, policymakers should adopt a collection of logical steps to enable the marketplace to innovate and meet the diverse health care needs of the American people.
The ‘market’ can fix middle class and above health care... the ‘market’ can build drive ways and homes... but NOT interstates. The challenge is better and cheaper... FOR ALL.
Give incentives for a CASH system to develop alongside traditional 3rd-party payer systems.
Let patients negotiate directly with doctors for this, give tax benefits to medical groups doing this.
Also allow people to form any health insurance association, group or collective they wish, without interference from Government. I am absolutely certain my Church, with its 1000 members, could create an insurance scheme for its members, that would take care of everyone in the Church, old and young, at much lower costs than government or 3rd party payer could.
enforce the rule of law and contracts against insurance companies. No “fine print” and no cancellations on agreed rates and terms.
An idea so crazy it just might work!
The free market economy brought America the best healthcare in the world until the feds began rooting around in the 70’s. The feds also have no constitutional authority to meddle in healthcare.
Economically and constitutionally, the market economy should run the show free from government interference.
Medicaid needs to focus on the poor who have nowhere else to turn.
I have always had a serious _itch about Medicaid. I’ve never understood why someone who was poor had better health insurance than someone who was working for a living. There has to be a better way than Medicaid.
Of course you could say that about a lot of programs but I was a MediCal eligibility worker and they had better insurance than I did who was handing it out to them. Used to peeve me off. lol
Fixed.
Here’s the problem, conservatives.
Free markets do not . . . no . . . CANNOT exist anymore. Frankly, for anything.
How is this conservative? Because of QE. Quantitative Ease. It exposed money to be a meaningless concept that all of society is based on.
If you can create the measurement methodology from thin air in an entirely whimsical way, then all things you measure with it, like capitalism and markets in general, cannot mean anything.
And we certainly can’t build an ideology like “fiscal conservatism” around it.
Bernanke destroyed everything, and not just him. Global central bankers all worked in concert to be sure currencies didn’t collapse against one another. The ECB is doing a trillion Euros of QE right this moment.
So . . . remember this when you offer up “the free market” as a way to solve healthcare . . . or anything else. It’s all gone. It’s not coming back.
Agree. It’s time to start with Medicare first and killing it. CMS should be gone immediately as well
They really need to focus on healthcare. There are NO companies offering private health insurance in Arizona. If you aren’t on Medicare or have work related health insurance, you have to go Obamacare. I had friends who had retired early and bought private health insurance. It was affordable before the Obamacare disaster. Now it is astronomically expensive and in some states, like AZ, you cannot get it at all.
I agree: Leave Obamacare to fail all on its own, and allow any insurance company to sell any health policy in any state by passing/changing/eliminating any laws/regulations.
Great idea but the healthcare industry is so dominated by government laws and regulations I don’t think it’ll work. This was true before Obamacare.
Some people can’t afford some things. Forcing me to do without the things I can afford by stealing my money to pay for others’ stuff is EVIL.
They need to enforce antitrust law against health care providers. It is illegal to have materially different prices for different customers.
The health care industry in the U.S. is built on a mindset where we can shamelessly expect other people to pay our health care expenses. There is no “market” solution unless that fatal flaw is eliminated.
That only holds if you assume the free market can’t deal with inflation of a fiat currency or find a means outside of it to handle transactions. Gold and silver are available right now as a legal tender medium of exchange, gold is legal to stipulate as a contractual obligation and currency can be stipulated as lawful money of the US.
Large entities for the most part see benefit in the Federal Reserve system. Individuals and small businesses are the “grass” grazed upon that feeds it and grows it via inflation and other more visible taxes. Until the small players realize that the primary means of changing the system is through their elimination of debt and utilization of available alternative means of conducting transactions they’re going to continue to be fodder for the debt note fiat pushers.
My daughter had surgery to have a benign mass removed over Christmas.
It was a 20 minutes procedure in out patient.
The bills do not stop coming.
I met the deductible. Now I am getting the 20%. Guess what, 20% of high numbers is still high numbers.
No more doctors here. I don't care if I am dying.
News Flash!!! Unlike those on Medicaid, those on Medicare pay into it. First when they are still working. Second once they are retired and receive Social Security they still pay into it, because the monthly amount we receive for Social Security gets reduced and the premium for Medicare goes up. We have not gotten a raise in our social security since President Bush 43 left. As a matter of fact we got a reduction once and the premium has been risen since that arrogant pos former occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave had been in office.
The Market is the ultimate cure but there still needs to be a transition to keep a lot who were strong-armed by the government to get screwed by the new regime. The resultant interim sucks but it is necessary.
The free market lets the unseen hand work, and the hand is much smarter than the elitists who want to control things centrally.
What you write about QE I think is true, but it does not have the effect you cite. The money manipulations by the elitists generally lift or lower ALL boats in the bodies of water they affect, bothering both free marketers and elitists. They steal money equally from both.
It is very bothersome, but it does not prevent a free market in our locality of these USA from being a very good thing.
Our body of water (these USA) can behave either more free market or more fascist (elitist/central control), and the results will be better and more just with free market, with individuals and families allocating their limited resources as they see best instead of as they are forced to do by central control.
Free market principles always work better unless they are targeted for failure by elitist laws, such as allowing health savings accounts but hamstringing them with distorted rules and regulations that prevent them from being used properly by the free market. Then they might seem not to work and the elitists love to point to the failures they themselves actually created to try to disparage the free market.
So we should not stop trying for free markets here, even if we cannot fix (presently) the money manipulations that make international free markets “impossible.”
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