Health Care and Other People's Money

A key component of the health care debate is that people who are not receiving the care but are paying the bills begin to separate cost from care. Cost control becomes its own objective regardless of the health care delivered. This is why, in a survey done of British taxpayers, the first question, "Is health care under NHS as good as it was before NHS" the answer was "No" and to the second question, "Would you like to go back to the old system?" the answer could again be "No."

Here are some proposals to help solve the health care problem in America:
1. Allow any insurer to sell any policy in any state. Mandate a deductible that increases with age.
2. Create a workman's compensation for bad medical outcomes to be adjudicated by a medical court where injured patients would receive compensation similar to workman's compensation, if deserved, and end malpractice litigation.
3. Use the time honored "soil bank" concept to supplant fee-for-service and "pre-pay" the physicians. Take each physician's earnings for the last five years, average them and declare that the annual payment for each of his next five years, regardless of how much work he did, how many test he ordered, how many patients he saw. Just send him the check every month and see if the overall cost of medicine goes down.