How the Government Could Avoid Failing at Health Care

Many people are afraid that the Government will take over / control the Health Care system. And that with this Government control, they will lose their ability/freedom to choose their doctors and treatments. Some think that the Government will ruin the Health Care system and transform a health and medical industry that can deliver the best medicines, treatments, facilities, and research in the world, into another also-ran, bureaucratized, lowest common denominator health care system. And these fears are justified given the Government will use the tried and untrue approach to Government sponsored programs that they have advanced and failed at for generations.

The pity is that the Government could set-up a Health Care program that would operate in fashion that would not be doomed to failure and would not be degrade the health of the average American. The Government would even be able to learn from the success of a viable Health Care system to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of other Government programs in other areas completely unrelated to health care. The requirement for the Government to be able to achieve an approach to health care that does not insinuate the Government into the Health Care industry as a corrupting and destructive entity is to change from a player that dictates and controls facets of the health care marketplace. This Governmental intrusion into the industry would affect the health care system by influence or control over factors like: price of policies/premiums, coverage requirements, compensation amounts for provided treatments, and other regulatory and policy controls that can be imposed upon various elements of the industry by a governmental entity that has no responsibility or accountability for the results or consequences of their policies, decisions, processes, or oversight activities. None of these controls provides productive and effective management for Health Care. They focus energy and efforts on accounting, on procedural reporting and administrative tasks, and on pursuing methods to leverage the loop-holes and gaps within the rules to game the system for the most money that can be garnered from the system.

The new approach to Health Care that the Government should be applying would be a competitive provider reward program. The Government should establish a health care insurance taxation system that reduces the tax rates for insurance companies that provide coverage plans that deliver the health care for lower costs than their competitors, conversely; insurance companies that average higher cost plans for covering the same treatments would pay a higher tax rate on their revenues. There is not incentive in the world more effective and motivating to corporations or individuals than a tax advantage to be better at your business than your competitors. The same approach can be applied to other members of the Health Care industry. Pharmaceutical companies would be likewise rewarded for providing lower cost products for treatments and dis-incentivized for higher costs for similar treatment products. Hospitals and doctors would have the same opportunity. If you can deliver the better results for the same treatments and services than your competitors then you get to make a higher profit then they do.

Isn’t this the way the America made itself great? We let people find ways to do a better job at a lower price and they won the competitive war. I don’t buy a more expensive car when I can get a better one for less money. People can go to any doctor they want, and the doctor can charge whatever price they want; but the doctor will pay into the Government coffers more than his peers that charge less for the same service.

This fundamental free enterprise, free market, capitalistic methodology to leverage a better priced product into the Health Care system would help transform the system and the industries to become better than they are today, and certainly better than they would become under a controlled Governmental bureaucratic program. The Government’s role here should be stimulative with oversight and assessment of performance; but not guiding. The experts or political influencers that the Government would manage to put into positions of power and authority would be the same incompetent players that screw-up everything else the Government does.