1, 2, 3 Healthcare

When I was sick as a kid—and yes, I’m quite old now—but when I was sick as a kid, my parents packed me up and took me to the local doctor who had his practice on the first floor of his house and he charged them $35.00 per office visit.

Besides a lot of years and inflation, what has driven up the price of healthcare? Technology, insurance companies, attorneys, the government and the paperwork they require, the cost of which has to be built into our medical bills.

Therefore, the first solution to high healthcare is to reverse the law that requires doctors to charge as much or more to their cash patients as they are charging their commercial insurance patients. Besides, they don’t have nearly the paperwork for a cash customer as they do an insurance patient.

The second solution is to institute tort reform as malpractice insurance is a huge factor in determining healthcare bill and it will also eliminate a lot of unnecessary tests the doctors order to cover their butts in case they are taken to court. Physicians should not be forced to practice defensive medicine and we should not be forced to do and pay for unnecessary tests and procedures. I have the tort reform option for my car insurance here in Pennsylvania and it saves me 40% on my bill. It should also make a huge difference on my medical bill as well.

The third solution is to allow medical insurance to be purchased over state lines to increase competition among the companies. Insurance companies should be allowed to consolidate their companies so they have one national headquarters, instead of 50 state headquarters. This will reduce their overhead and—hopefully—they will pass the savings on to us.

Reversing laws that dictate what physicians can charge, tort reform and de-regulating insurance companies are three solutions that should change our national healthcare for the better and allow hospital and doctors to function with less government intervention and without looking over their shoulders at preying lawyers. It should also cut our bills in half.

Above are 347 words (and I wrote every one of them)—not 1000+ unread (and unreadable) pages—and I think we can all agree that this would make a mighty fine start to solving our problems without increasing government intervention in healthcare or growing a new governmental agency to suck off a 20% administrative fee from our taxes or medical care.

Oh yeah, and Medicare should stop paying for those motorized scooters. But that’s another story of fraud and abuse.