Politics: Ideas on health care in the USA

Wonder if any of the people on the Hill are reading these articles?

The Problem is Cost of Care by Michael Munger who is a professor of economics, and the chair of the political science department, at Duke University.

Excerpt:
The problem is that health care costs have increased at an annual rate double, or more than double, the rate of inflation for the last two decades. Right now, our attempts at reform are doomed by a law of accounting physics: Insurance can’t cost less than the health care it insures. That means that subsidizing insurance likely makes the problem worse.

Cato's What Is the Free-Market Approach to Health Care Reform? is another that goes beyond the usual mantras of "public option" and "mandated insurance."

Excerpt:
We also need to rethink medical licensing laws to encourage greater competition among providers. Nurse practitioners, physician assistants, midwives, and other non-physician practitioners should have far greater ability to treat patients. Doctors and other health professionals should be able to take their licenses from state to state. We should also be encouraging innovations in delivery such as medical clinics in retail outlets.

This sounds a bit like what I heard a couple of decades ago when I was an undergraduate at UCLA. For fun, I took a class in the School of Public Health about Health Care Systems. It was a survey of the different methods health care was delivered in the USA in the 1980s. It touched on how some other countries do it also and discussed some of the problems and challenges ahead.

One of the comments that stuck was when one of the profs remarked, we need more "Doc in the Box!"

The point was that a lot of what doctors deal with are pretty mundane.

So I suppose real reform will need for all interest groups to take a hit:

Patients - bearing a higher percentage of the cost of our own care.

Doctors - allowing non-MDs to carry more of the work load.

Insurance companies - tighter regulations on them regarding denial of coverage on pre-existing conditions.

Trial lawyers - tort reform to help reduce the cost of malpractice insurance and excessive defensive medicine.

Government bureaucrats - might they realize that the solution big government believers want is actually making the problem worse? The government already has a big hand in health insurance through the Medicare program and that program is going broke!