Healthcare reform – empower the consumer
Health savings accounts and high deductible health insurance can provide benefits to the consumer without increasing government control that inevitably leads to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats rationing your healthcare. This isn’t speculation but the conclusion of research into 10 years of consumer driven healthcare in the United States.
The benefits include cost reduction, cost containment and at least equal or greater use of preventative care than the current system.
Cost-savings in the first year of instituting a CDH plan relative to a traditional plan ranged from 12% to 21%, remarkably large figures. Moreover, costs appear to grow more slowly under CDH plans than under traditional plans.
The knock on CDH plans has always been that they could cause people to avoid preventative case. Not only does this appear to be false it's the opposite of the truth […] (source)
Thanks to Patient Power which makes a necessary point:
And no, I am not saying that high-deductible insurance plans are right for everyone. Government should not punish people for buying them by enforcing a tax code that encourages people to buy excess insurance. Nor should government make high-deductible plans illegal, as Massachusetts has. (source)
And Marginal Revolutions concludes it’s post with:
It's remarkable that in the current debate over how to control health care costs so little attention is being given to the important results of our 10-year experiment with consumer driven health plans.
Well yes, it’s rather hard to discuss anything when one is being called a political terrorist or racist because of disagreeing with Obamacare, and we are being told to quit talking and just get out of the way.
Obama likes to talk about increasing competition with health insurance companies, yet no plan the Democrats have offered works to remove barriers to competing across state lines, or reduce mandated benefits which eliminate high deductible insurance from markets. That this 10-year experiment is also not being mentioned is hardly surprising.
All of that and the initial rush for passage of a bill with such far reaching effects, stopped (so far) only by citizen participation in the public square, makes one wonder if improving our health care is really the goal.
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Filed Under: Politics -- Obama -- Healthcare_reform
Author: Mark K. Sprengel | 10:08:00 PM |
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