Thursday, October 28, 2004

Position - Health Care

The federal government must do something about people not having health care...however, it's current method is creating higher and higher costs to individuals and businesses.

My suggestion: allow the federal government to pay the premiums necessary for everyone to purchase their own insurance. Corporations don't want to be in the health care providing service and employees don't want corporations involved in their health care. Consider the premiums to be income and those with higher incomes will pay taxes on the premiums. Raise the personal exemption to eliminate the tax consequences on lower income people. Let people be ranked by doctors according to an established criteria to assess risk for premium calculation and then let people have a voucher they use to select their own providers. HMO's and PPO's can compete for people and local hospitals and doctors can compete on providing services. Changing even the Medicare system to this system would reduce the anti-competitive nature of third-party pay systems. Further, companies would have one less expense they could write off and therefore could afford to pay their employee's just a little more....it would also make them more competitive with other countries that do not pay for employee health care.

Tracy

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