…But getting stronger, apparently, in terms of the Tea Party. He announced today that he’ll be giving a speech next Thursday on his plan to “to repeal and replace Obamacare.” The Daily Caller reports today:
In his pending speech, Romney will describe a plan to “restore to the states the responsibility and resources to care for their poor, uninsured, and chronically ill.” The federal government will fund “a tax deduction to those who buy their own health insurance, just like those who buy it through their employers… streamline the federal regulation of healthcare [and] reduce the influence of lawsuits on medical practice and costs,” according to the statement.
Overall, according to Romney’s press statement, his plan will “make healthcare more like a consumer market and less like a government program.”
Well, we could definitely use more of that. I won’t be convinced until I see the plan, but some semblance of a market definitely needs to come to health care. As I’ve written previously, we have a system where payments to doctors are largely determined by a small board of bureaucrats called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC). The factors influencing the board are a major cause of the rising costs of health care and the increasing discrepancy between pay for specialists and generalists, among other things.
