What would be your ideas for Health Care Reform?

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Forums > All Posts > What would be your ideas for Health Care Reform?

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2011-07-06 10:53 AM

joshdondich
Prior Lake, MN
Posts: 2

My ideas to reform healthcare are of the following.
1. Expand Medicare and Medicaid into a public national health insurance system to provide a alternative to private insurance while covering low-income families, disabled and the elderly.
2. Allow states to opt-in into medicare, or allow the states to expand their public healthcare programs.
3. Allow private insurance to compete across states with other private insurance to provide low cost competitve services.
4. full tax deduction for the health care costs of all Americans forced to pay for their own health coverage under current reforms.

2011-07-06 01:36 PM

CARLITOS BAM-BAM
Dallas, TX
Posts: 897

Your talking about a means-tested saftey net + interstate private market competition.
This would expand not only the socialist part of the health care system, but private "free" market competition as well. Let us be clear, allowing private insurers to compete across US state lines is not consistent with a fundamentalist States Rights approach. It would require federal regulation of healthcare. Not to set minimums, but to prevent US state governments from blocking the liberalization of what has traditionally been there's to regulate on account of devolved federal power.

I think global payment Medicare-for-all (with means tested copays and supplemental private insurance) is a better way to go then private insurance for individuals.
Congress is well within their right to pass such legislation. According to United States v. South-Eastern Underwriter's Association (1945) the federal government can regulate health insurance. Obamacare repeals/reforms the McCarran-Ferguson Act which delegated the federal government's authority to regulate health insurance to the states.
One reason to maintain a reformed federally regulated version of the current private health insurance industry is too avoid disrupting capital markets which have invested large sums of money in the health insurance industry and stand to lose big time in the event of nationalization.
Now I do believe that, at some point, it will be more cost effective for the state exchanges to evolve into national or regional exchanges, where a broader number of consumers can bid down the prices of a larger number of insurers competing for our health insurance dollars. Even in a system with national or regional exchanges, we could still maintain state regulations above federal minimums.
The problem is linking up insurance providers and consumers from different areas of the country. Not all insurers want to compete all over the country. It's expensive. Insurers need to be able to negotiate with provider networks to control costs, and they can't do that as effectively if their customers are spread out all over the country recieving care in various health networks.

Interstate compacts could service the development of larger and larger exchanges, and thus facilitate more competition in private insurance. We need to give Consumers a platform to comparison shop for private insurance with relative ease. Right now, Consumers do not have enough market information to make real price discoveries in the marketplace, meaning, the fundamentals are not driving the price of insurance. US state regulations allow insurers to cherry pick and extort their way to massive profits. State healthcare exchanges with federal minimums is a smart way to clean up the marketplace and get insurers back in the business of actually providing "health insurance" instead of finding ways to screw over their customers in order to make profits.
Its fair to insurers (everyone has to play by the same set of rules) and innovative for Consumers.
This is the 21st Century, it's time markets start behaving as advertized.

2011-07-08 10:42 AM

CARLITOS BAM-BAM
Dallas, TX
Posts: 897

Video: Eric De La Cruz & Healthcare Reform (NIN)

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