Under all healthcare plans currently in place or proposed, the costs of medical care and insurance premiums will continue to increase.
No Obama healthcare plan, Trump plan, Paul Ryan plan, Orrin Hatch plan, or any other plan that simply shuffles the money around, or emphasizes either individual or community responsibility, will have any success whatsoever in reducing healthcare expenses. All are doomed to failure, as far as lowering healthcare costs.
Although I have great intellectual respect and personal admiration and appreciation for our healthcare practitioners (because they have saved my life and continue to enhance the quality of my life), I believe that the entire industry is bloated with entitlement. This is because medical practitioners, including physicians and pharmaceutical CEOs, have come to view themselves with almost godlike status–and we enable them.
Medical practitioners have also been able to insulate themselves from competition and price reduction by preventing changes in the law that would increase competition and require pricing transparency.
Furthermore, market forces do not curtail or reduce medical charges/costs. This is because medical care has “inelastic demand.” This means that when you are confronted with a life-altering illness or injury, you often cannot question the cost for treatment, cannot negotiate for lower costs, and cannot shop among competing medical providers for more competitive pricing.
If you want affordable yet effective healthcare, and you want to have minimum standards for healthcare insurance contracts, such as no lifetime caps, coverage for pre-existing conditions, and care for those who receive care in emergency rooms because they lack health insurance or money, you must recognize that all healthcare reforms are doomed to failure unless they include that we:
1. Deregulate the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets by allowing competition in these markets, not only across borders, but across continents.
2. Increase and subsidize the number of medical and nursing colleges, and exponentially increase those who are licensed as medical providers.
3. Continue with the requirement that both individuals and businesses have to carry health insurance or pay a tax to cover non-covered healthcare expenses for those who report to emergency rooms, or to other medical care facilities, and are given care and do not pay for it.
4. Reduce intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, etc. so that more businesses and manufacturers can compete to provide such pharmaceuticals or medical devices.
5. Require all healthcare providers to provide the same discounts for all patients, regardless of the healthcare insurance that they maintain.
6. Require that all health insurance companies have some uniform requirements, just as we do for auto and other types of insurance policies.
7. Last, and most importantly, if the healthcare industry refuses to self regulate, then it must be regulated in the same manner that public utilities are regulated, by setting pricing controls.
Loren M. Lambert © March 8, 2017
No Obama healthcare plan, Trump plan, Paul Ryan plan, Orrin Hatch plan, or any other plan that simply shuffles the money around, or emphasizes either individual or community responsibility, will have any success whatsoever in reducing healthcare expenses. All are doomed to failure, as far as lowering healthcare costs.
Although I have great intellectual respect and personal admiration and appreciation for our healthcare practitioners (because they have saved my life and continue to enhance the quality of my life), I believe that the entire industry is bloated with entitlement. This is because medical practitioners, including physicians and pharmaceutical CEOs, have come to view themselves with almost godlike status–and we enable them.
Medical practitioners have also been able to insulate themselves from competition and price reduction by preventing changes in the law that would increase competition and require pricing transparency.
Furthermore, market forces do not curtail or reduce medical charges/costs. This is because medical care has “inelastic demand.” This means that when you are confronted with a life-altering illness or injury, you often cannot question the cost for treatment, cannot negotiate for lower costs, and cannot shop among competing medical providers for more competitive pricing.
If you want affordable yet effective healthcare, and you want to have minimum standards for healthcare insurance contracts, such as no lifetime caps, coverage for pre-existing conditions, and care for those who receive care in emergency rooms because they lack health insurance or money, you must recognize that all healthcare reforms are doomed to failure unless they include that we:
1. Deregulate the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets by allowing competition in these markets, not only across borders, but across continents.
2. Increase and subsidize the number of medical and nursing colleges, and exponentially increase those who are licensed as medical providers.
3. Continue with the requirement that both individuals and businesses have to carry health insurance or pay a tax to cover non-covered healthcare expenses for those who report to emergency rooms, or to other medical care facilities, and are given care and do not pay for it.
4. Reduce intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, etc. so that more businesses and manufacturers can compete to provide such pharmaceuticals or medical devices.
5. Require all healthcare providers to provide the same discounts for all patients, regardless of the healthcare insurance that they maintain.
6. Require that all health insurance companies have some uniform requirements, just as we do for auto and other types of insurance policies.
7. Last, and most importantly, if the healthcare industry refuses to self regulate, then it must be regulated in the same manner that public utilities are regulated, by setting pricing controls.
Loren M. Lambert © March 8, 2017
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