New doctors and retired doctors will love this system because they get standard hours, don't have to worry about the business side of running an office AND don't have to pay the high malpractice insurance. It's a win for the old docs and for the young and for patients.
If Trump offers a $600 per year per citizen payment (to be used at the patients discretion) it will be a health care system that could put him over the top. People could spend the money at Walmart, or copays, for glasses, and all citizens would gain from the $600. Even seniors on Medicare Advantage could use the money for copays...
Your $600 per person idea is intriguing. It steals a lot of thunder from the Yangs as well as from the free healthcare for all push. I am very disappointed that the GOP had years to repeal and replace Obamacare but when given the chance had nothing in place.
Alone that $600 project is not enough, but it’s a good marketing ploy and a good thing for the people to offset some of the costs that Obamacare imposed on everyone. Use it with your insurance or as cash payment anywhere - including glasses, teeth, exams & tests etc. Cut the out of pocket expenses from many plans.
I don’t recall all the details - but I recall reading/hearing about a push for national health care during the Nixon admin. He was opposed to any kind of NHS system. But then his advisers told him about Kaiser Permanente. KP is a doctor owned cooperative. They sell policies and members of KP can go to any KP doctor, clinic... and today 40 years later they have large hospitals located all over the place out west. They may be the single largest insurance and provider in California. It is cost effective, though like all plans the costs and deductibles have almost doubled since Obamacare. They have the silver/gold/platinum plans like other insurers do I’m not quite sure what differences there are. Anyway, Nixon was very much in favor of the KP type market based solutions of doctors joining cooperatives. This WalMart plan is in the same vein.
There are other issues that can be solved fairly simply. Nobody should be bankrupted by medical costs, so, pass a law that prevents any medical care judgments from taking a person’s home or their savings/income up to a certain amount. In addition, and I am no fan of taxes, but think of the FDIC bank insurance system. Banks pay a small % of their holdings into the fund every year and if any bank goes under the FDIC bails out the depositors. DO the same thing with medical care. Put a small transaction cost on medical services that goes into an FDIC fund to cover some portion of provider losses due to patients inability to pay.
These are all market based solutions to the problem that would help a lot. And I agree, the AMA needs to lighten up. As diagnostic tests and equipment improves, diseases will be easier to spot. Not something for today perhaps, but maybe when techniques improve there can be different levels of doctors and nurses. Do you really need 12 years of training to set a broken bone? The key (and main problem) is that when people show up with a broken bone they may have other problems and doctors need to be able to identify those. But that is when other diagnostic techniques can come in.