Posted on 09/09/2009 2:10:17 PM PDT by CMoran325
As President Obama prepares for his health care speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday evening, a new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute calls on the President to acknowledge that America’s health care system is plagued by too much, not too little, regulation.
The study concludes that tax preferences for employer-sponsored health insurance, as well as federal and state benefit mandates and pricing regulations, distort the health care market in a way that limits choices for individuals, reduces competition among insurers, and artificially inflates costs for health care services.
“Many of the problems with run-away healthcare costs can be traced to the third-party-payment system and a maze of complex federal and state insurance regulations,” write co-authors Gregory Conko and Philip Klein. “More government intervention will only add cost and complexity to the health care system without solving the underlying problems.”
“To broaden affordable coverage, prior reform efforts have implemented restrictions that raise the price of insurance coverage, leading many healthy individuals to forgo insurance altogether,” write the authors. “These laws give patients and doctors incentives to over-spend on health services and force individuals to pay for benefits they don’t need or want.”
Instead, Conko and Klein recommend reforms that eliminate market-distorting government regulations and use targeted programs to help subsidize the small number of remaining uninsured who cannot get or afford health insurance. Among the recommendations:
1.Modify tax policy to eliminate the disincentives for individual purchase of health insurance and health care. 2.Eliminate regulatory barriers that prevent small businesses from cooperatively pooling and self-insuring their health risks by liberalizing the rules that govern voluntary health-care purchasing cooperatives. 3.Eliminate laws that prevent interstate purchase of health insurance by individuals and businesses. 4.Eliminate rules that prevent individuals and group purchasers from tailoring health insurance plans to their needs, including federal and state benefit mandates and community rating requirements. 5.Eliminate artificial restrictions on the supply of health-care services and products, such as the overregulation of drugs and medical devices, as well as state and federal restrictions on who may provide medical services and how they must be delivered. 6.Improve the availability of provider and procedure-specific cost and quality data for use by individual health consumers. 7.Reform the jackpot malpractice liability system that delivers windfall punitive damage awards to small numbers of injured patients while it raises malpractice insurance costs for doctors and incentivizes the practice of defensive medicine.
Just a thought.
Americans also bear the brunt of product liability insurance that drug companies must carry.
Great proposals!!! Will never work or be passed because evil demoRAT socialists will NEVER NEVER NEVER vote for any plan that actually spends less & is more efficient than the federal gubmint trough & is not staffed with SEIU union thugs. Throw these bastards all out of office and start over is the only way we can remove layer after layer of useless, restrictive, costly & stifling bureacracies & regulations.
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