Thoughts on Healthcare reform and HR3200 specifically.

Does America need Healthcare Reform? Is HR3200 the right kind of reform?

Yes and no. First of all if you have not read HR3200 yet – you should. Just Google HR3200 and download the bill in .PDF format. Do it today and read it.

There are a few things that get lost in all the bickering and fighting going on with this issue. So let’s make a few points. First, every single person in America – even illegal immigrants are currently covered catastrophically. What does that mean? You can currently walk into any state funded or city funded hospital in America and receive medical attention and anything else you need. Recently many private facilities have adopted the “do not turn away” approach as well. Technically speaking the U.S. does offer healthcare coverage for every person in the country. The questions arise when discussing issues like routine exams, physicals, and ongoing medical conditions like cancer and other illnesses.

America does need reform in this area, I would agree. However what we really need is insurance reform, tort reform and pharmaceutical reform. Without these three things – nothing else works. Any healthcare plan that does not include reform in these areas is doomed to failure. Ah, but there is a major challenge: The attorney lobby owns the democrats and the insurance lobby owns the republicans – so we have old fashioned Washington grid lock. What lacks is the leadership to make both sides give enough to pull this off and make it work.

What we know for sure is that Medicare is just about totally bankrupt and even President Obama himself said the system has about ten more years to live. So do we really want a government run healthcare plan – when they can’t even keep the one we have solvent? Anything the government tries to manage becomes the deep dark whole in which billions of dollars flow into and we just never seem to get the ROI that is expected. We need key leadership to make the changes necessary to create the kind of change this country really needs. A government run healthcare plan is NOT the way to go. And certainly not a single payer healthcare plan.

OK, so what do we do about the roughly 46 million Americans or 15% of the population that do not have healthcare coverage? This group is mostly made up of people in their 20’s and older folks who are pre-Medicare ages. The younger ones I am not as worried about because they are basically healthy and other than catastrophic things (of which are covered) they will probably get along just fine until they can afford healthcare coverage. The older folks are who I worry about because they are having heart trouble and getting cancer and other diseases. We could in fact lower the age for Medicare eligibility to say 50 and capture all those folks in this category. Obviously it would require a re-structuring of Medicare so it can remain solvent – but it is an option with an existing plan that is already in place.

So let’s look at those three key areas I discussed up top. Insurance reform; why are insurance rates and certain coverage’s completely out of line and in some cases not covered at all? Lawsuits. Because of the out of control casino style judgments in many of these frivolous lawsuits – doctors are forced to order way more tests than they should or normally would – just to cover themselves in case something is missed. In the 90’s they were dubbed “lawsuit Millionairs”. There are doctors that I know personally – surgeons, OBGYN’s and others who pay in excess of $500,000 per year for malpractice insurance – that is crazy! Lawsuits with HUGE judgements drive up the cost of healthcare astronomically.

Next we need to bring the margins down on these ridiculously high drug costs. I know that drug companies have overhead and development costs - but lets face it - by not allowing other companies to have access to patented formulas, and the drug companies ability to keep them locked up for X many years, leads to overtly high drug costs. All they have to do is shorten the time frame before drugs go "generic" and that will solve that issue. Generic drugs are cheap - problem solved. Right now drug companies hold patent rights on drugs for 7-10 years. Just shorten that time to 3 years.

So this then brings me full circle to the leadership issue. President Obama needs to take a page from a recent great leader before him and look to what worked and rallied both parties and all of America to embrace MAJOR change. Do you remember the Tax Reform Act of 1986?

In 1986, Ronald Reagan and Bill Bradley were able to create a legislative miracle. They created a tax reform that stripped loopholes, political favors, payoffs, patronage and other corruptions out of the tax system. With the resulting savings, they lowered tax rates across the board. Those reductions, combined with the elimination of the enormous inefficiencies and ridiculous incentives that go into tax sheltering, helped propel a 20-year economic boom. The current proposed health care plan HR3200 proposes to fix our extremely high-quality (but inefficient and therefore expensive) health-care system with 1,000 pages of additional complexity -- employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions -- with the promise that this massive concoction will lower costs. It needs to be stripped and simplified NOT made more complex....Dems and Repubs alike rallied behind Reagan and his reforms - because they were true reforms not added government bureaucracy. This is what this country needs and what scares me about the proposed healthcare plan.

America needs a strong leader now more than ever - I guess this is where I want President Obama to step up and be the leader I think he could be and abolish the grid lock! It's this very kind of stalemate that will continue to eat up cost and NOT solve the real issues.