I believe we need health care reform in this country. I have a plan to improve health care.
First, tort reform. My research shows that tort reform could reduce medical expenses by $400 billion a year. Some states have already capped lawsuits. If $400 billion were taken out of the cost of health care, it would be a good start to add uninsured people to the rolls of insured.
Next, raise the budget for internships so we have more doctors and more competition. I have written in prior blogs about how the budget that determines the number of internships has been cut in the past few years. Start there, and provide more doctors to provide more health care before you juice up the demand for care without providers.
Put all government elected officials and employees who are on the blue ribbon health care plan on the Veterans medical plan. That will accomplish two goals. One, the insurance for our heroes will get better. Second, the savings we get will can go into the pot to pay for more internships and add provide insurance to more uninsured.
Eliminate fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. It is estimated that annual fraud runs a high as $10 billion dollars. Before you sell us the idea you can run health care in this country, fix the pieces you already mis-manage. Reel in that money, tighten the system, and use that money to add people to the medicaid roles.
Get serious about illegal aliens. They add billions to health care cost with visits to emergency rooms that are never repaid.
Offer tax breaks to small businesses that don’t offer health care. Employers who have less than 20 employees, e.g.
Encourage business to have wellness programs to reduce their health care expenses.
Offer tax incentives to the insurance companies to develop better data bases to offer patients and health care providers.
Give doctors tax incentives to do pro bono work on patients who can’t afford health insurance.
Start with the savings from tort reform. It would flow through to the doctors who get reduced premiums. Require every doctor to rebate 50% of that savings to an uninsured patient fund. That fund would go to states to fund added patients to medicaid. Then, more can qualify for medicaid. Hence, we get more off the uninsured rolls and less traffic in the emergency rooms.
