Regulate Healthcare Insurance Industry
Most Americans agree that healthcare should be available in some form to all its citizens as a human right much like we agreed back in the 1930’s that Americans should be able to retire with some income hence Social Security. The concept of the Social Security Trust Fund, where it was to be funding through payroll taxes over a person’s working life in order to have a retirement income was excellent. If this Trust Fund would have stayed in its orginal form and not robbed and funded with IOU’s, would we be heading for the train wreck we all see coming with this unfunded mandate. Maybe someone could do the math and respond to this blog if they have any idea where we would have been today if the Trust Fund would have be kept in place.
If you love the Social Security story, wait until you start trying how to figure out how to fund healthcare for all Americans. With Social Security, you have a fairly simple pure public plan. In other words, 100% of funds are collected and administered by the Federal Government.
With healthcare, you are talking about a vast array of for-profit businesses where any tinkering with prices for products and services could throw our economy into a tail spin potentially many times worse than what we are in now. Legislators are talking about trying to co-mingle some form of public or cooperative plan into our present healthcare structure. Trying to figure out how to fund such a system and maybe more importantly, what the effects on our economy will be when you start messing around with a very robust private sector healthcare industry are almost entirely unknown.
Taking these potential problems into consideration then, what approach is the best way to bring healthcare to the poor and uninsured with the least amount of changes to our present system? In my mind, the answer has to be REGULATION and in some cases DEREGULATION of the health insurance industry. Regulate the health insurance industry much like we regulate utilities. We have long ago deemed utilities a necessity for the public good. Does not healthcare fall into this category?
Another regulatory necessity would be to have TORT reform in order to limit liability amounts that can be paid for human suffering or malpractice. Healthcare never has and never will be an exact science. Unless it can be proven without a shadow of a doubt that there criminal intent to harm a patient, the astromical amounts doctors and surgeons have to pay for insurance is one of the first regulations that must take place.
Regulation of the insurance industry will not be easy, but as long as reasonable profits can be produced to maintain the insurance industry workforce without the executive salary and benefits packages being out of line, it should be doable.
Get everyone in the country into the insurance pool and come up with a reasonably priced premium for employers and individuals to pay. No disqualifications for pre-existing conditions. No need for another layer of administrators. For those that can’t pay, the premiums would have to be tax payer subsidized.
If we agree that we want to do this, it would be the easiest, least expensive and quickest way to provide this basic human right.