Posted by Shyam Moondra
The escalating health care costs are impacting families and businesses. In the face of government inaction on this issue, many corporations are washing their hands off this problem by cutting back employee/retiree's health benefits and increasing co-pay and deductibles. We already have 40 million Americans without health insurance, and given corporate cutbacks and sharp increases in premiums, the ranks of uninsureds will only increase making this crisis even more serious.
The current free-market model is broken. Most health care providers are milking this cow to the hilt - the greed has taken over their any sense of moral responsibility. Insurance companies, HMOs, hospitals, doctors, and drug companies are all increasing their charges in unrestricted way. There is no free-market competition; what we have is an industry-wide conspiracy to make more and more money.
The present health care system is beyond repair. What we need is a fundamental overhaul of the whole system. Any new system should have the following elements:
1. The government should takeover the health care insurance business. Having the efficiency of a large single carrier and removing the profit motivation from the equation will reduce the costs considerably. This single carrier should offer health insurance to all Americans, either through employers or directly to the people who do not have employer provided benefits (e.g., self-employed people).
2. The government, as a single carrier, should negotiate the lowest possible prices with hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and other service providers.
3. Medical record keeping and billing systems should be automated to reduce the operating costs of the health care system. Special provisions should be made to ensure the security and privacy of medical information of individual patients that's put on on-line.
4. The medical malpractice laws should be reformed to minimize frivolous lawsuits that increase the malpractice insurance premiums and eventually the health care cost. Having more transparency on this issue will also make the doctors stop prescribing unnecessary tests that they otherwise do to just protect themselves from potential malpractice law suits. The malpractice lawsuits should be allowed only in cases of genuine incompetent errors on the parts of doctors and hospitals.
5. Eliminate all tax write-offs for drug companies and other service providers in the industry.
6. Rewrite the patent laws to allow the marketing of generic drugs sooner.
7. Impose limits on marketing campaigns by drug manufacturers and ban the practice of giving kickbacks to doctors for prescribing specific brands of drugs.
