A Few Reforms in Healthcare…

We have the greatest system of healthcare in the world but we have a payment system that is broken. This is a fact that can’t be refuted. Our doctors, nurses, technicians, EMT professionals, fire fighters, and our hospitals are great examples of our dedication to improving and saving lives. It is the question of how we pay that is at the root of the healthcare problem and I have a couple of quick changes that would immediately reap some rewards:

· Make every patient pay for their own care. This is done by reform #2.

· End employers paying for health insurance. Instead give each employee an amount of money per year placed in a health payment account, tax free, to handle basic care that we can use to pay our medical bills.

· Included as part of the employer program is a catastrophic insurance plan to cover significant illnesses that often can bankrupt families whose premiums are also less costly due to actuarial table data.

· If you are self employed you can contribute to your own plan same as above.

· Cap all lawsuits involving medical issues and for unique cases that do involve gross malpractice have a review board made up of medical experts, lawyers, and civilians with at least a college degree, to decide if cases warrant additional compensation and or criminal action. This will allow real negligence cases to be handled as they should be but filters out the “ambulance chasers” with a jury that is prone to “screw” the rich doctor or insurance company.

· Repeal the laws that force hospitals to take the uninsured. People don’t need health insurance if the emergency room will take them for the flu or an appendix. It should be a hospital’s choice and professional decision on whether or not to treat a non emergency patient. Our emergency rooms need to be a place for real emergencies, not just a back door way to get to see a doctor, or deliver a baby.

· We also need to allow nursing professionals to open clinics to take care of simple and common health issues like the flu, physicals, vaccinations, strep throat, runny noses, and simple follow up visits.

We have a very large group of elderly heading toward the finish line and they will need a lot of medical services. Much of what is needed can be taken care of by having services broken out from the expensive hospital and surgical centers we currently use. We only need surgical and advanced medical conditions to be using hospitals.

I know doctors want to protect their turf but there will be more than enough business to go around in the coming years. There is no need to worry about that! Doctors deserve to make a lot of money because they have invested a huge amount of their life and money to their career but by creating easier and more accessible health care locations at a lower cost will actually create more business not less.

These are the issues we need to discuss, and if you noticed not one of these reforms have anything to do with government. They already have a mess on their hands with Medicare and Medicaid. They don’t need anything else to make a mess of right now. They are doing quite well already without breaking the greatest system of healthcare services in the world…