Posted by Lambchop
Republicans need to get their act together. The solution to American healthcare and health insurance is just not as complicated as previously thought. Most people agree it is just plain stupid and wrong that folks are prohibited from purchasing coverage because of the notorious PRE-EXISTING CONDITION.
The problem is our definition of “insurance”. Costs have risen astronomically because the doctors (and patient) have contributed to the ever-expanding use of “covered” medical services – services that should not be covered in an “insurance” policy to begin with. Insurance as THE primary method of payment for healthcare services inhibits the cash market and drives prices higher.
Insurance should be an instrument to pay for large, unexpected, catastrophic expenses. Period. This DOES not include regular or predictable expenses – getting your teeth cleaned, sports participation physicals for children, or annual PAP smears, etc. Insurance should follow you (the individual) from state to state, job to job, condition to condition. Insurance should be purchasable at any time – whether you are “sick” or not and guaranteed to be “renewable”.
How do you fix this? Recognition that the government terminated this free market by regulating it out of existence is the first step in understanding the problem. The government subsidizes employer group markets but not a separate marketplace for an individual to purchase health insurance – for instance, employers are given a tax deduction for participation in a group plan. The government has long lists of expensive mandates for benefits that do NOT meet the definition of catastrophic coverage – pregnancy coverage, smoking cessation programs, weight loss surgery, and psychiatric treatment.
If the government would de-regulate and terminate the policies and eliminate all of the mandates that increase pricing, stop trying to protect the consumer from “bad” economic decisions, and stop thwarting competition allowing the competitive market to bloom – costs would necessarily decrease. Imagine being able to call or look up a medical facility’s website to shop prices for an MRI, a specific blood test, or an annual physical.
Competition is regulated in almost every area of healthcare – from the building of new hospitals to the number of dermatologists able to practice in a geographic area. If we had a totally deregulated free market for individual (catastrophic) insurance, costs would IMMEDIATELY decrease to the point where mandates would be unnecessary.
The result of our current system is a gigantic bureaucracy in which insurance patients are ridiculously overcharged for non-insurance based healthcare services primarily to subsidize Medicare, while cash patients are turned away or absurdly overcharged.
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