Jul
11
The Next Right recognises that the right are “floundering” in providing alternatives to the Democratic Party’s drive for healthcare reform. They come up with five seemingly sensible alternatives to the mandate driven reform agenda of the Democrats.
- Let People Buy Health Insurance across state lines. I’m not sure why this isn’t allowed anyway. Is it because each state imposes different requirements on insurers? Perhaps our American friends can enlighten us Brits. As a way of increasing competition and driving down price, this seems like a perfectly sensible solution.
- Give poor and working class people vouchers to pay for healthcare. Whilst there are approximately 45 million uninsured Americans, only 65% are considered as being low income households. Mandating healthcare for the 35% who are uninsured through choice rather than through financial necessity seems a colossal waste of money. This voucher option is much more targeted, and therefore more financially beneficial.
- De-Couple Health Insurance From Jobs. I’m not sure how this would work practically, again help is needed from our American friends. But again, the premise of this seems to be sensible. The recession shows the weakness of an employer provided health insurance.
- Give greater access to health savings accounts for use on the small stuff.
- Stop Driving up Costs With regulations and Mandates. People should be free to buy the level of coverage they need. Mandated requirements for insurers prevents genuine price and service competition. It is also likely to drive smaller insurers out of the market, leaving the larger insurers with a virtual monopoly. No wonder insurance is so expensive.
If the goal of healthcare reform is to ensure that as many people as possible are covered whilst keeping costs for the taxpayer and insuree to a minimum, ideas such as these that focus on competition and choice, are much more likely to be successful than a single payer bureaucratic monolith. One can argue about the need for government action in any social issue. But it is fairly inarguable that in almost all cases, such government action is usually unnecessarily costly and inefficient.
Health reform has proven to be notoriously difficult to pass. Hillary Care was the obvious example of this, but ObamaCare is having it’s fair share of difficulties too, from the cautionary impulse of Blue-Dog Democrats to the party infighting evidenced recently by MoveOn.org’s attack on Rahm Emanuel. Whilst I’m not a Congressional expert, I would think that Next Right’s proposals would be much more easily passed (either as one package or incrementally) than the trillion dollar plans being touted in Congress at the moment. And if it is more likely to be passed, then it is more likely to be beneficial to the American people.
Comments
8 Responses to “A Conservative Solution To Healthcare”
Leave a Reply
The number of Americans without health care is greatly inflated by the left.
There is a large number of young people who chose not to purchase health care, they perfer to buy new cars, clothes and entertainment with their salaries. Another large percentage is undocumented illegals. Does anyone in their right mind, believe we should be giving health care to non-citizens. Many of the people left make over $75,000…are cheap and perfer to get free health care by going to government sponsored hospitals…That leaves a small number of people that truly need some help with their health care. It’s simple…leave everyone that has work related health care alone, force the people who have the money to purchase health care, to do so, don’t give illegals health care and give the small remaining people health care…but you can bet that Obama and the leftys in Congress will screw this up like everything else they touch.
Why is this whole thing so complicated? In Africa you have private insurance companies for those that can afford it and government hospitals for those that cant. It’s much the same here in the UK with BUPA serving private patients and the NHS serving the general masses.
In Africa you sign up to a medical aid society and it remains independent of your job. If you change jobs you keep the society and their medical provision is excellent. As one society competes against others for business, there is competition and thus fees to be in the society are kept trimmed by supply and demand.
Government doctors are generally quite good and the operating theatres often use private-funded surgeons on a top-up payment system the government gives them.
Why is a sophisticated country like the USA struggling with such a simple problem?
OT:
“Why is a sophisticated country like the USA struggling with such a simple problem?”
The insurance companies in the US have a huge vested interest in what happens with healthcare. They are spending an average of $1.4 PER DAY on lobbyists to make sure that they can keep their high profit margins over actually dealing with sick people.
The fear they have over the public option is purely financial, everything else is secondary. If they were so sure of the quality of their services and knew the public trusted them they would not fear a government run programme, which according to conservatives cannot do anything right.
Their willingness to deny a choice to the public is just disgusting, but they have put a lot of money down buying off Congresspeople and Senators so they think it’s worth it.
Israel
1. 4 dollars per day. My they are big spenders
Cabbie:
Wow!! What a cock-up by me!!!
That should have read $1.4 MILLION per day.
At least l can smile on my way to work today!!
The opinion piece has no author. If someone does not even want their name on it, how can I take it seriously?
Judy
Welcome.
When you say no author, do you mean on this blog or at the linked to site Next Right.
If you mean Next Right, the post identifies Max Borders as the author. If you mean on this blog, if no author is identified, that means that I, Conservative Cabbie, am the author. If one of our other bloggers writes a post, they are identified by their moniker.
Sorry for any confusion.
Hi Judy,
The opinion piece is written by C. Cabbie who started this blog. Otherwise, it will have contributors names on the opinions. I hope you’ll stay, I seem to be the only woman here giving her two cents.