Big Bailout Will Sink National Health Insurance

With the national financial artery severed due to moronic mortgage mismanagers—even I knew these no interest, no down payment mortgages would result in foreclosures, so why didn’t the big salaried?—it seems to me that any chance for a fully funded national health insurance is quickly fading. We are just too broke.

At the same time, with insurance companies increasingly cherry picking and raising premiums through the roof, a pure market system won’t work either. Thus, it seems to me we should begin to focus on ways to make private health insurance—subsidized and regulated some by the government, a la the Medicare Drug Plan—more accessible and affordable. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Eliminate state-by-state markets and permit national coverage to facilitate greater spreading of the risk.
2. Create 10 national private plans akin to the Medicare Drug Plan, an approach which I like, to allow freedom of choice, but also set floors of coverage.
3. Have the government guarantee catastrophic care, which should help keep the pressure off of premiums.
4. Permit high deductibles and copays to discourage over utilization.
5. Encourage health savings accounts and permit tax deductions (or perhaps credits) for the price of premiums.
6. Permit people to buy into Medicare at age 60.
7. The basic plan will have to only cover the basics; limited mental health, no dental, no elective abortions, only partial prescription payments. If people want those kinds of elective coverages or greater protection, they should pay for it themselves.
8. Increase the uses of physicians assistants, certified nurse practitioners, and properly licensed midwives—under the direction of a physician—for primary care and obstetrician services.
9. Encourage price competition in both the funder and service provider sectors. This should include increasing the doctor pool to allow the law of supply and demand to click in.
10. Sorry, but to qualify for coverage, someone will have to be a citizen or legal resident.

Of course, that is pie in the sky, since we are so divided politically and culturally from each other that those fights will probably prevent any solution—whether nationalized or primarily privatized—from taking hold. Plus, for even a partially government funded program to work, we will have to triage government and ruthlessly cut in other areas. So, I am not holding my breath.

But the status quo will not hold. So, unless we want a total collapse, we’d better learn to work together and reacquire the ability to compromise.

And as for fighting global warming—if it exists—fuhgataboutit.