Whew!
That didn't take long.
The ill-designed ObamaCare system didn't even manage to outlast the Obama administration.
Two leading health-care experts James Capretta and Scott Gottlieb, both resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (Gottlieb is also a medical doctor), write in today's Wall Street Journal that the current situation "offers a generational opportunity to pursue a new direction for American health care."
Rep. Tom Price, a congressman from Georgia and physician whom Donald Trump has nominated as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Resources, "will now be leading the charge." Price has consistently put forth alternative legislation to ObamaCare.
Capretta and Gottlieb write that the new system should be "fully consumer driven, empowering individuals to be the surveyors and purchasers of their care." The window of opportunity will not be for long, they say, and urge the administration to keep four central reforms in mind.
The first central reform:
Provide a path to catastrophic health insurance for all Americans.
One of great fears of most Americans is that a catastrophic illness will wipe them out financially. Thus health insurance is key financial security. Capretta and Gottlieb say that catastrophic insurance policies should become available and that such policies should include basic prevention coverage (vaccines, for example) and should not exceed around $5,000 for an individual.
The second central reform:
Accommodate people with pre-existing conditions.
One of the problems, if health insurance is really insurance (which means that risks are calculated in the pricing), is that pre-existing conditions would make insurance impossible or too costly. But Capretta and Gotlieb note that most Americans are uncomfortable with people being penalized financially for health conditions beyond their control. While setting up ways for people to get insurance, even if they have abruptly left a job, there is also a high risk pools can address the issue of people who remain uninsurd but need medical attention.
The third central reform:
Allow broad access to health savings accounts.
Capretta and Gotlieb propose a one-time federal tax credit for people to open an HSA.
The fourth central reform:
Deregulate the market for medical services.
The authors argue that HSAs will give the demand side more power but that the suppliers also need freedom to tailor their own packages of services. This is the most complex of the four reforms, and, with pre-existing conditions taken into consideration, might be expected to generate the most concern from consumers.
They explain how it might work:
For example, those consumers who maintain HSA balances should be allowed to use their resources to purchase direct care—basic services that keep people healthy and treat illnesses and chronic conditions—from physician groups. This might take the form of a monthly fee, a practice sometimes referred to as direct primary care. Today, this could be considered an insurance premium that’s barred by law.
Hospitals and physicians should also be allowed to sell access to their networks of clinics, oncology services, and inpatient facilities as an option to be used in the event a patient is diagnosed with an expensive illness. Medicare patients should be allowed to purchase the option to consult with their caregivers by phone, videoconferencing, or email. . . . Regulation shouldn’t be an obstacle to entrepreneurs crafting more consumer-oriented services, many of which can’t be countenanced under current rules.
These four proposals take medical decisions away from the government–which is just what progressives don't want to do. But it is the collapse of their own system, whereby the federal government seized one sixth of the U.S. economy, that has paved the way to such reforms as proposed by Capretta and Gotlieb.