Compare Democratic and Republican Healthcare Plans and What the Public Can Do About Them. The healthcare and medical insurance industries are massive with billions of dollars of income. They are able to buy advertising and lobbyists to gain every advantage that money can buy. To listen to the podcast, click below.
Do we really have any chance of meaningful change for an industry that all but regulates itself? Or should we just resign ourselves to healthcare and insurance companies doing and charging what they want with little if any restriction on them? On this podcast, with what is a more optimistic point of view is respected Houston based neurologist and founder of the Houston Healthcare Initiative, Dr. Steven Goldstein.
Healthcare reform according to the Democrats is some form of single payer system. According to the Republicans it means more price transparency and more competition between insurance companies. The Democratic reforms will indeed lower healthcare costs by fiat and not cause any appreciable decline of public health. However it also will not improve public health. It will however make individual patients unhappy because of rationing of care. The Republican reforms will have little effect on lowering costs but will avoid the rationing of care. It also will not improve public health. No matter which reforms are adopted patients will be unhappy with the results. Also no legislation will be passed without the blessing of the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals.
What Can The Public Do?
Individuals and companies need to walk away from the insurance system. If enough companies and individuals leave, the current system will collapse. The best alternative to insurance at this time is the healthcare cooperative. When combined with a health savings account and a high deductible sharing of healthcare costs we can begin to see a gradual reduction in cost. Of course, the best way to lower costs is to lead a healthy lifestyle. This will indeed improve public health. For the medicare age groups, the managed medicare plans lower costs by partial rationing of care combined with encouraging a healthy lifestyle. I do not have the statistics as to whether or not managed medicare plans improve public health.
What About Obamacare?
Didn’t the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obama Care, make more choices for insurance available and penalize people who did not purchase health insurance?Yes, but look what happened to health insurance premiums. They kept rising even faster than before. The subsidies, while allowing more people to be covered by insurance, were a boon to the insurance companies allowing for the increase of premiums and increasing the number of policies sold. This is why the insurance companies and hospitals were in favor of the bill in the first place. We can see the result- higher premiums. Things are worse than they were before. The overall insurance system is flawed in fundamental ways. We are spending time and money to make a bad system work better and that is probably what will happen in the near term.
There needs to be consequences for individuals that do not take care of themselves. They can subsidize the government insurance by paying the government a higher premium; pay for care themselves or do nothing. For those that do nothing, laws need to be changed so that care would only be provided at charity hospitals. I know this is a radical change of thinking but i believe it would go a long way to improving public health. Subsidizing unhealthy behavior only leads to more unhealthy behavior.