MY HEALTH CARE REFORM PLAN, PART II: In my last entry, I described my scheme for health care reform, based around a federal health insurance voucher system (not unlike the idea of local governments issuing school vouchers to parents for the education of their children). Today I want to follow up on what could happen on the supply side, under such a scheme. To cut to the chase, I believe that a lot of good things could happen on that side.

My initial assumption was that when a citizen received their annual health voucher, good for so many thousand dollars worth of coverage as determined by Congress, that citizen would use their voucher to purchase a one-year health insurance policy which meets minimum federal coverage standards and regulations. I assumed that a number of different health insurance companies would offer a number of different policies tailored to customer preferences. The market would be nationwide, so that the barriers in our present state-by-state system would be removed. This would provide everyone with a range of competitive choices, similar to what exists for most other kinds of insurance products (life, auto, home, business, etc.).

Hopefully the insurers will compete based on quality of customer service,  »  continue reading …

I decided to take up the intellectual challenge of designing a health care reform package. Yes, I finally put together an answer to the perpetual question, “what would you do?” I’ll explain in a minute. But first, let me say this: when you actually try to put a health care plan together, you soon fathom just how complicated the whole thing is. There are a lot of conflicting interests; improve one thing and you potentially cause disaster regarding something else (e.g., you can make the system fairer and more accessible to the less fortunate, but you then reduce the incentives for life-saving innovations and cost-containment efficiencies). Once you start designing an answer to the health care crisis, you soon see that there’s no way to do what President Obama says that he and the Democrats will do. Sometimes you hear people say “the health care situation is really very simple, all you have to do is . . . ” And their solutions sound good for a half-hour or so, until you think through what would could go wrong. The general answer is, a LOT could go wrong with any simple solution to the health care crisis in America.

The first principle of my own reform plan is HONESTY. I would tell America this about my plan: it would seek to control costs, maintain affordability, and guarantee access to health care for everyone while fostering personal freedom, a range of consumer choices, and incentives to continue developing new life-saving drugs and other treatments. But it will NOT guarantee that anyone below the $100,000 income limit will get medical coverage at least as good as they have today for not a penny more. It will not insure that everyone can keep their present insurance plan and doctor if satisfied (which around 80% of people are). For some people, perhaps many people, it might mean additional financial burdens in terms of medical care payments, insurance fees, or taxes.

I can reasonably claim that in the long term, more people in America  »  continue reading …