Non-Governmental Solutions to Health Care Problems

Viewpoint has an article titled A Better Way to Do Health Care Reform. It makes an excellent point about the relationship between high-deductible insurance policies and affordable health insurance. RLC links to another article at Reason, quotes from it and then adds this comment of his own:

As has been suggested by others, perhaps health insurance should be more like auto insurance. We expect our health insurance to cover everything from prescription drugs to doctor visits for the flu, but we don't expect such routine maintenance for our car to be covered by our auto insurance. We buy auto insurance in the case that we have a catastrophic accident, not to cover state inspections or to have a fuel pump replaced.

By placing the responsibility for purchasing insurance on the individual consumer rather than on employers the employee could be given the cost of their insurance otherwise withheld in their pay check, they would have portability since they wouldn't lose coverage if they switched jobs or lost their job, and employers would benefit by having more money available to them to hire more employees.

Ideas like this are at least worth looking into, but they're not going to be popular in Washington because they wouldn't allow the government camel to get its nose inside the tent of our health care.

The last paragraph gets to the heart of the problem. The high cost of health care is viewed on the left as an opportunity to enable the federal govvernment to regulate and control our health care system. There are better approaches which both keep down costs while retaining the advantages our system affords.

A Different Approach to Health Care Reform

The article Another Good Conservative Alternative To Obamacare is worth a look. Specific health care reforms are suggested which are not part of the administration's plan. There are many good suggestions but two stand out in my view. One would nullify state laws which limit the competition of insurance companies within states. Some competitors are kept out of particular states to the detriment of competitive insurance options. The other concerns tort reform which could make insurance premiums for good doctors reasonable.

Coercing Health Care

America's Health Insurance Plans is an organization composed of about 1,300 member companies which provide health insurance coverage to over 200 million Americans. This trade association, representing the interests of health care insurers, has launched a campaign, they depict as grass roots, whose goal is to push for government health care initiatives.

The Heritage Foundation has argued (correctly in my view) that the health insurance industry is convinced that coercing 50 million Americans into becoming customers is good for business.

U.S. Health Care

Science Daily features an article titled American Values Blamed For U.S Health-care Crisis. The article cites information gathered from articles authored by Dr. Marc Nuwer which appear in the journal Neurology. The theme of the linked article is that Americans have to adjust their thinking for the good of our health care system. I was surprised to learn that we currently spend more than two trillion dollars a year on health care which is four times a much as we spend on national defense. This is predicted to go up to four trillion by 2015 which would make health care 20% of our GNP. It is already the largest sector of the economy. There is also this (quoting):

10 percent of U.S. expenses are spent on "defensive medicine" — pricey tests ordered by doctors afraid of missing anything, however unlikely. "Doctors don't want to be accused in court of a delayed diagnosis, so they bend over backwards to find something — even if it's a rare possibility — in order to cover themselves," Nuwer says.