You'll shortly be receiving for your consideration the health care bill that was passed by the House (as if you didn't already know that!).
I'd recommend that you and your fellow Senators simply burn it and start over from scratch. It's a horrible travesty of a bill that doesn't even try to address health care issues in America.
Not only do I think the bill passed by the House is the wrong answer... I'm not even sure it's the right question!
I think we should work towards a market-based approach that encourages and rewards creative solutions by the private sector by doing things like (in no particular order):
- Crack down hard on fraud and abuse.
- Establish "best practices" for common diagnostics that will simultaneously give doctors freedom to handle individual cases individually, but also avoid trapping them into ordering a CAT scan for every head cold.
- Streamline the billing and payment system for more efficiency, lower cost, and better transparency of those real costs to the end user.
- Promote HSAs and other things that will allow end consumers to understand the real costs of their health care, while encouraging competition to drive those costs down.
- Encourage "team care" and better sharing of medical records so that patients don't have to start over from scratch with each new specialist they see for a particular condition.
- Understand that PROFIT is a motivator, and can be a good thing if utilized correctly.
- Understand that government is inherently inefficient (that's not necessarily a bad thing, but must be taken into consideration), and should be in the business of setting the rules, not playing the game.
There's probably a few more ideas I could come up with, but that's a start. The point is, we don't need government mandates, single payer, "public option" and all of that. We need efficiency - and efficiency comes from a competitive market with the right safeguards in place.
It is well known that business - like people - respond far better to positive reinforcement than negative. The House bill is a stick, and it's being used to fix the wrong problem. Throw it out and grow a carrot that will fix the right problems!
I'm sure you'll do the right thing regarding this issue. After all, your job depends on it!
Thank you,
BGTwinDad
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