Straight Platform Politics

The Free Market And Health Care – Part 3

  “What Is the Free-Market Approach to Health Care Reform?” This is an article published on The CATO Institute on Health Care Reform. http://healthcare.cato.org/     The article lists seven reforms; we have reviewed the first four and will now look at the last three. See Part 2

Reform 5. “We also need to rethink medical licensing laws to encourage greater competition among providers.” Examining the history of enabling legislation in the health care system causes many people to conclude that much of the legislation was enacted to protect the profession and not the patient. See The Four-Party Health Care System series

Reform 6. “Congress should give Medicare enrollees a voucher, let them choose any health plan on the market, and let them keep the savings if they choose an economical plan. Medicare could even give larger vouchers to the poor and sick to ensure they could afford coverage.” This may encourage a healthier lifestyle in the elderly while improving competition among insurers.

Reform 7. “The expansion of ‘health status insurance’ would protect many of those with preexisting conditions.” (See the February 18, 2009 Policy Analysis by John H. Cochrane on the topic of health status insurance at http://cato.org/ )

There have been good health care reforms proposed by a number of people and organizations. Many of these reforms would not be costly. But, are Congress and the President listening?

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The Four-Party Health Care System – Part 4

The Summer 2009 issue of The Independent Review included the article “The Modern Health Care Maze: Development and Effects of the Four-Party System” by Charles Kroncke and Ronald F. White. The four-party health care system seemed liked a successful solution to the failing three-party system. See Part 3

However, as the four-party system became more costly to the insurance companies, insurance policies began to include deductibles, co-payments, and lifetime limits. And a “large number of patients with pre-existing conditions were excluded from coverage.”

But this employment-based system already left out many people such as the unemployed, the part-time worker, the self-employed, and those employees working for small businesses that could not provide health insurance.

As the number of uninsured patients grew, the four-party payment system was in jeopardy. The federal government stepped in again to rescue it by creating Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 – “removing the two most costly patient populations from the private coverage pools (the elderly and the poor).”

But these programs could not continue to prop up the failing four-party system. They just delayed the inevitable. “The current crisis in health care in the United States has been fueled by diminishing access, dubious quality, and spiraling costs. These problems can be directly attributed to employment-based health insurance.”

And this four-party system can be directly attributed to government enabling legislation. The authors call the four-party system the “crown jewel” of enabling legislation.

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