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To: Sooth2222

If the repeal comes with a Commerce Clause attack on the reasons for high medical costs, then it won’t be a disaster. The market will cure high healthcare costs.

You don’t need insurance, you need access to care. It would be a blessing to have Obamacare repealed. The Commerce Clause should attack and destroy any state, county or local law that harms interstate competition in healthcare.

That means:

1. insurance can be bought across state lines.

2. medical professionals can cross state lines.

3. zoning/licensing limitations would end and allow direct competition.

4. laws limiting medical practices be owned by physicians would end.

5. allow pharmacists and RNs to proscribe and etc.

At the federal level, allow doctors to use pharmaceuticals off-schedule, allow the patient and doctor to use experimental drugs and allow all drugs/medical devices approved in the EU and Japan to be used in America pending FDA approval.

Then over time, let the FDA die.


39 posted on 05/09/2015 3:34:02 AM PDT by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
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To: 1010RD
If the repeal comes with a Commerce Clause attack on the reasons for high medical costs, then it won’t be a disaster. The market will cure high healthcare costs.

I can't deny that many of your proposals might help, but that's more on your list than just the repeal of Obamacare.

(I don't believe the majority of physicians go into private practice any more -- they are often employed by hospitals (Link). We seem to have #4 already, albeit not in a way that might deliver a better product at a lower price.)

Prior to the passage of Obamacare, the US spent nearly twice as high a proportion of GDP as any developed country but we ranked 49th in life expectancy at birth in 2010 (ref: CIA World Factbook). I've concluded that Obamacare accomplished something that I thought was almost impossible -- to make a dysfunctional and wasteful health care system even worse.

I'd argue that the basic problem is that the incentives are there to produce more health care products and services without bounds but there are fewer systemic incentives to produce more health. Many of today's common medical procedures can't be shown to produce any increase in life expectancy, and some might even have a negative effect. IMO, this dysfunction stems from the very roots of the practice of paying for health care in the US as an employment benefit and that goes back more than 70 years to WW2. (It's taken 70 years to create this mess. I doubt it can be fixed in my lifetime.)

Not that there haven't been many beneficiaries of Obamacare. Have you been following the stock prices of hospital companies, drug companies, insurance companies and medical device manufacturers since Obamacare? Unfortunately, the consumers and taxpayers are not among Obamacare's beneficiaries.

48 posted on 05/09/2015 6:18:07 AM PDT by Sooth2222 ("In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve." - Joseph de Maistre, 1753-1821)
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To: 1010RD
Then over time, let the FDA die.

Are you sure? Thalidomide, melamine, Baycol. Just to name three substances FDA has banned or has banned products for containing.

Every now and then they earn their keep. Otherwise, how would you induce the proprietor of a trade name and a profitable product that is lawful to sell, to withdraw his product from the market when he makes his living from it? He will throw every nickel he makes at you in the form of legal pettifogging, Philadelphia lawyering, and just plain vituperation in the press. You ready to stand up to all that, just because his product harms people?

66 posted on 05/12/2015 1:23:24 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("If America was a house, the Left would root for the termites." - Greg Gutfeld)
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