It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that when the
Democrats in Congress passed the so-called Affordable
Care Act (AKA - Obamacare) they sold the American people a bill of goods. The
original bill topped out at over 2700 pages and since then the Obama
administration has issued in excess of 20,000 pages of regulations to implement
the clearly flawed plan.
Aside from all of the baloney about keeping your doctor
and your plan and saving you money; the goal of some of those pages was an
effort to improve the quality of the care delivered in the United States. While
I won’t engage in an argument with idiots who think that Cuba’s health care
delivery surpasses that available here in the States, as someone who’s day job
is in health care, I will say that there is always room for improvement in the
delivery of care. The problem is that the government and regulations are
probably the worst possible vehicles for driving improvement.
In the time since Obamacare passed and was signed into law,
there has been an ever shifting sands of rules and regulations that healthcare
providers have been forced to address; each coming with a higher and higher price
tag. Much of it boils down to additional reporting and paperwork and the
manpower needed to handle it all. One unfortunate side effect is that health
care providers have tried to maintain costs and larded this mountain of
additional work on existing staff, which drags down their ability to actually
provide care.
As if to illustrate my point about the government being
the worst vehicle to drive up quality, Scott Atlas, M.D., a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and
a member of Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Health Care Policy, has
served up the new book, Restoring
Quality Health Care – A Six-Point Plan for Comprehensive Reform at Lower Cost. Minus
the end notes and index, Dr. Atlas managed to offer up a concise and
comprehensive reform plan in an easily read 99 pages.
Many of Dr. Atlas’s suggested reforms involve the
streamlining of processes; process improvement is one of the cornerstones and
goals of any strong health care provider, so it would make sense that a physician
would bring this approach to the table. Process improvement…not a government
bureaucrat’s long suit.
Dr. Atlas also suggests injecting market based reforms
into the health care process, including the expansion of and incentivizing of
Health Saving Accounts (HSA) for all Americans. Atlas even goes so far to
suggest that HSAs be issued at birth like Social Security numbers. By beginning
the process early, incentivizing people to contribute to the accounts through
tax breaks, making the HSA portable, and allowing these account to pass to
family members without taxation upon a patient’s passing, a deeper level of
understanding and control over health care spending would become ingrained in a
society. This is a clear market force that would drive up quality.
Dr. Atlas also explodes the myth of Medicare excellence.
He describes Medicare as being “a disjointed and antiquated system designed for
decades long passed.” Again he offers a common sense reform for streamlining
the bulky, bloated and confusing systems of Parts A, B, and D which only serve
to increase administrative costs and baffle the seniors the plan was designed
to aide. As Atlas points out in the book, the cherry on top of this mess is the
plan fact that the Medicare system is in dire financial straits.
While the government tried to “fix” health care with a
lumbering, bloated, Goliath of a plan, Atlas choose to go the route of David
and offer up a quick, nimble plan to reform and improve the quality of health
care we all receive.
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