Political Reform

Health Care Reform

Page 4


          6 The central part of this plan is to allow people to use a debit card linked to a savings account for most of their health expenses, and only use insurance to pay for the unexpected costs.  This would be a high deductible, catastrophic insurance plan.  One of the benefits here is that your health records can be linked to your debit card, which can have advanced security features.  These features could include, picture ID on the card, biometrics, complex passwords instead of a simple pin, and an imbedded smart card.  The embedded smart card could encode important medical information for emergencies such as allergies and current prescription drugs you are taking.  This could help in the event you need treatment, but you are not able to give this information to the doctor treating you.  This debit card could easily be queried to test for sufficient funds to pay for a treatment.  Since the high deductible insurance would kick in once your spending passes your annual deductible, if you have up to your deductible amount in your debit account the available balance would come back as essentially unlimited.   Cheaper health plans might require you to continue paying a percentage even after you reach your deductible.  Even here the computer can easily calculate the total you can spend based on how much is in the account, and what your deductible is.  This will simplify payment for health care immensely thus reducing management overhead.

          7 One of the reasons we are currently debating in our government the idea of requiring everyone to have insurance is because uninsured people can often get free health care by going to an emergency room and claiming it is an emergency.  This behavior not only ties up emergency personnel with trivial problems, but also adds a lot of cost to the running of a hospital.  This only happens because the government requires emergency rooms to treat anyone that comes in, even if they don't plan to pay.  I would end this behaviour, and allow emergency rooms to triage patients who come in, and if their condition is not life threatening then they will be referred to the regular treatment channels.  Those who truly can't pay would be able to get federal assistance such as medicaid or medicare, all others CAN pay, they just don't want to.  They may have to take out a payday loan in order to deposit enough into their debit card to pay for service, but if people can take out loans for things as trivial as the new motorcycle they want, then they can do it for their own health care.  Not being forced to give out tons of free treatment will lower costs to hospitals enormously, as well as making the emergency rooms much more responsive in the case of a real emergency.

          8 the individual mandate, to make all have insurance is not needed, since insurance isn't the only way to pay.  You can simply require all employers to at least offer to help set up a health savings account.  If they chose not to make contributions that is their choice.  Since paying in cash will get you the lowest prices available, you can withdraw cash on a credit card, or personal loan, and get medical care that way if you choose.  The idea that you can only get health care if you have insurance that covers it is false, and came about due to government wage fixing several decades ago.  This idea needs to be abolished.