Patients in the United States receive the best health care in the world, but because of shortages of medical professionals and lack of affordable health insurance options, reform is essential. In medicine, there’s no such thing as a Republican disease or a Democratic disease – there’s just disease; likewise, good ideas on health care reform shouldn’t be defined by a party, but by meeting a series of principles for reform. Rather than scrapping everything we have and starting over, I believe there are a number of common-sense solutions we can take that will increase access to care and reduce costs, including:
·Reducing regulations and costly benefit mandates that reduce the number of affordable insurance options;
·Allowing small businesses to have larger purchasing power by pooling their resources;
·Allowing workers to have greater portability with their health care;
·Streamlining the excessive paperwork and administrative burdens;
·Reforming the health insurance industry to ensure needed care is always prioritized over profits;
·Creating new tax credits for individuals who need healthcare but don't receive it through their employer.
One proposal I am opposed to is a takeover of our healthcare system by Washington bureaucrats. Whether you call it a “public plan” or a “government-run option,” the long-term result is a system where care is dictated not based on need but based on a budget.
I’ve seen it happen in my own state of Tennessee when we created a program called TennCare. The program was created to provide universal coverage, and overpromised with a generous benefit package and very little in the way of copayments and premiums. When employers figured out they could shift their health care costs onto the state plan, many workers saw their coverage reduced despite promises that people could keep the care that they had. With too many people in the program and an exploding budget, care was rationed, compensation to providers was slashed and the ability of patients and doctors to make decisions was compromised.
