Health care could be more cost effective

U.S. health care is no longer even close to tops in the world, much less cost effective.

Patients, doctors, employers and taxpayers are all fed up. The only real winners are insurance company executives and bureaucrats. Republican alternatives to Obamacare, as outlined by Sally Pipes (“Here’s how to create a better health policy than Obamacare,” Jan. 8), are woefully inadequate. They rearrange pieces on the board rather than changing the game.

Health care costs cannot come under control under a model where huge monopolistic insurance companies, hospitals and drug companies pretend to compete, and the whole of Congress is complicit in the charade. Costs will come under control when a real, individually based marketplace is achieved. Meaning that roughly 90 percent of patients pay for 90 percent of their own care out of their own wallets, 90 percent of the time.

This can be accomplished without resorting to the vast health insurance machine. A responsible system, while requiring patients to pay first dollar out of pocket, would also provide 100 percent full deductibility for all medical costs and would backstop everyone in the country with a government-sponsored catastrophic coverage plan so any care exceeding 5 percent of a patient’s gross income in a year would be covered, period.

Patients with income below 105 percent of poverty would simply be covered. A plan of this or similar nature would cause health care costs to plummet by the simple application of microeconomic principles, while at the same time protecting everyone’s right to health care.

This story was originally published February 5, 2016 at 3:27 PM with the headline "Health care could be more cost effective."