For the record, here\u2019s what I think we should do to improve health care in the US:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Public Clinics<\/strong>: I have no interest in providing or mandating insurance<\/em> to the whole country. Insured or uninsured really makes no difference to me. What I care about is that nobody goes without basic health care<\/em> just because they lack money. When I say \u201cbasic health care,\u201d I\u2019m talking about the same stuff that we provide to third world countries. It\u2019s in the same stack as \u201cfood,\u201d \u201cclothing,\u201d \u201cshelter,\u201d \u201cclean water,\u201d and so on. How do you provide this? Public clinics. Plain and simple. I\u2019m told that many cities already have a decent model for this. San Francisco among them. I think there ought to be some nonzero cost as a gating factor \u2013 and that cost ought to scale with whatever you reported on last year\u2019s income tax form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that greatly simplifies the rest of the question. Once we take care of the people who *need* a socialist solution, we can let capitalism do its thing. However, in order for the market to function effectively, the consumer needs to be making decisions based on price and value. Instead, we have this crazy cabal of insurance companies, employers, and medical providers driving costs through the roof. Simply having a \u201cpublic option\u201d (clinics, not insurance) will do a little bit to control prices. However, that\u2019s like saying that a public defender\u2019s office serves to control prices on lawyers. Of course it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regulate the most egregious sins of the medical Insurance Industry<\/strong>. These people are fucking us. The manner of the fuckery is well documented. Dropping policy holders when they are diagnosed with a serious illness, refusing to even offer a policy of *any* sort to those with \u201cpre-existing conditions,\u201d and so on. I say, if you want to provide health insurance, you need to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n * Never say \u201cno,\u201d to anyone. There has to be a baseline risk pool that everyone can get into. Sure, it\u2019s gonna be pricy and restrictive. However, that pool must exist. And here\u2019s one for the providers: I need to see the price *before* the procedure gets done \u2026 and the price needs to be the same whether I pay or they do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay, now the market can do its magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the small business owners I talk to, an individual medical insurance plan costs about $700\/month. A family plan costs around $1200\/month. That\u2019s between $8400 and $14,400 per year. In a good year, that\u2019s a lot of money for a checkup and a couple rounds of penicillin. In a bad year, it\u2019s chump change. I suspect that if we stopped trying to cover both our social medicine and our insurance on the same sort of policy, we would see changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ideally, I would like a policy with an annual deductible of about $5,000, that cost me about $4,000. Most years, I would make money, spending the $8,000 I\u2019m saving on insurance. Other years would suck because I suffered major injury \u2026 but I would have that catastrophe covered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the record, here\u2019s what I think we should do to improve health care in the US: Public Clinics: I have no interest in providing or mandating insurance to the whole country. Insured or uninsured really makes no difference to me. What I care about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care-and-medicine","category-politics-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1937,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936\/revisions\/1937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
* Give me the option of paying for my own care rather than passing it through and affecting my premium.
* Offer policies directly to consumers rather than to businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n