When it comes to health care, there are indisputable truths. Health care is expensive. Health care insurance is expensive. Access to health care can be difficult for many people.
Over the last 50 years, state and federal governments have insulated themselves into health care, passing laws and regulations resulting in higher prices, less competition, less transparency of health care costs and diminished innovation. Regulating health care is what has created the problem we all face today.
Government intrusion into health care has allowed special interests to flourish. Insurance companies report record profits, predominantly because of health insurance. Pharmaceutical companies have had similar success. Hospitals, which at one time were managed by doctors and were a place where they could take care of their sickest patients, are now a central part of the health care industrial complex.
Go to any city in the United States and the largest and most elaborate building projects are hospitals. These entities have been allowed to consolidate, restricting competition, thereby making health care less accessible and more expensive. Were this not bad enough, this shift in power in health care gives rise to cronyism in the form of campaign contributions, ensuring that the status quo does not change very much.
The losers are quite naturally patients, who need a place to turn when they are sick and injured. Doctors have always been the ones to meet these needs, but over time they too have been victimized by this system. The special interests who now run our health care system have systematically undermined the doctor-patient relationship, making it more difficult for physicians to help patients navigate a system that can hardly be called a system at all.
Once again as has been the case every two years at election time since 2008, health care is the major issue. Some Democrats are trying to convince Americans that this time they finally have the answer to our health care problems … if we just give them the opportunity.
The only problem is that they can’t settle on which disastrous government-run plan polls best; repairing the failing model of Obamacare or Medicare for All — complete takeover of health care for everyone with elimination of private health care and current Medicare. Albert Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Americans should remember this and not give lawmakers an opportunity to make things even worse.
In order to fix health care, we need to abandon “conventional wisdom.” We do not have a health care “system” but rather a conglomeration of services, industries and goods that are connected by a common thread. The only way to bring this together into a system is to further regulate it, which requires more government control- something that has failed miserably up until now.
We do not have a food or a housing system, both basic human needs like health care. When the rest of the industrialized world is moving away from socialized health care because of its failings, we should pay attention.
Americans want to choose their doctor, to be able to get timely health care, to decide where they will be taken care of. They also want their health care to be affordable. If politicians actually attempted to discover what patients want with their health care, they would see something far different from the garbage that they are peddling.
The Job Creators Network Foundation actually asked more than 25,000 Americans from all demographic groups what they wanted regarding healthcare. They discovered what one might expect. People want to be able to choose their doctor, to get timely health care, to decide where they will be taken care of and not have health care bankrupt them.
Taking this into consideration and listening to doctors, JCNF developed a framework that can make these hopes a reality. Healthcare For You is a personalized health care platform that centers on patients’ needs and not based upon a top-down, one-size-fits-all system run by bureaucrats.
Health care should run like everything else in America. Competition works best everywhere it is allowed to flourish and results in lower prices and more innovation. Over regulation creates unnecessary hurdles that hampers this. It also perpetuates the current system that has failed millions of Americans.
Those who try to create fear about a free market health care system have ulterior motives such as controlling this process or preserving their lucrative businesses. Health care in a free-market system will become unbelievably affordable when the “fat” is taken out of the system. It already has worked in the Direct Primary Care sector, where individuals can have their own doctor and have open access to him or her for as little as $40/month.
There will always be those who are going to be challenged by medical problems that will prove to be costly to take care of. This is the role of insurance and of safety net programs. The solution to the health care problem is based upon determining how to address the 10 percent who would be considered “outliers” without punishing the 90 percent who are generally satisfied but would like to see things improve.
Americans are smart and when presented with facts and not fiction they make good choices. That will be the choice in November.
