Steve Forbes writes in the latest issue of Forbes magazine about the future of the Affordable Care Act.
WITH THE OBAMACARE exchanges collapsing and millions of people being battered by ghastly increases in health insurance premiums, what’s to be done?
Forgetting that socialism doesn’t work–never mind that it’s deeply immoral–Democrats are addicted to the idea of government-dominated health care. They see ObamaCare’s terminal crisis as the perfect opportunity to realize their age-old ambition of socialized medicine, hence the current mouthing of such slogans as “a single-payer system,” “Medicare for all” and the offer to consumers of “a public option,” i.e., subsidized policies from a health insurance company run by Uncle Sam.
Republicans should be ready with proposals that will help health care ultimately become a normal market, where patients are in charge, not such third-party payers as health insurers, Medicare and Medicaid. Currently, the patient isn’t the “customer,” which is why so many thousands of them die unnecessarily from infections received at hospitals or from medical errors. The current system works to make the patient as passive as possible. A consumer revolution won’t be achieved overnight, but several ideas will help.
– Nationwide shopping for health insurance. Bust up the Balkanized, state-by-state arrangement we have today. We’re one country, after all. There’s no reason that a resident of, say, New Jersey shouldn’t be allowed to buy a policy offered in Wisconsin. Let scores of companies compete for your business instead of the handful you now have.
– Transparency for prices. Require hospitals and clinics to post their prices for all treatments, medications and services. The disparity in pricing can be astonishing. …
… – Transparency of performance. Require hospitals to post monthly statements on how many patients died from infections contracted after they were admitted.
– Medicare transparency. Reveal each year what Medicare recipients–hospitals, clinics, practitioners–receive in payments from the Medicare program. Such information would be hugely useful in ferreting out fraud, as suspicious patterns and practices would be quickly apparent.
– Equalized tax treatment. Employers and the self-employed can deduct their premiums. Individuals can’t, which can immediately put them at a huge disadvantage regarding the effective price they get for insurance.
– Freedom of choice. Let people choose their own policies, not be required to accept what bureaucrats think they should have.
