November 04, 2010
A Reasonable Alternative?

Ok, so, Congressional leadership has changed, Obama (hopefully) realizes his messiah image only works on MSNBC, and everyone on my side realizes we don't have the votes or the mandate to actually repeal Obamacare outright. Is there a third way? This guy thinks so.

Allowing any people, especially young people, any sort of choice in their health care decisions is of course anathema to progressives, but since they've now been de-fanged, could something like this have a chance? On the one hand, it makes way too much sense to go anywhere in a typical Congress. On the other, this is not going to be a typical Congress. Definitely something to watch, in my opinion.

Posted by scott at November 04, 2010 12:55 PM

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I've been asking for this for quite some time. Hell, I'd even sacrifice the "free" yearly office visit for a significantly lower premium. For women, however, I realize that a yearly check-up is a Very Good Thing, so that should be included.

Or, alternatively, make it required such that if you don't your premium doubles for the year. Make the premium nice and low if you:

-maintain a healthy weight
-maintain a low resting heart rate and low blood pressure
-don't smoke
-keep any other blood tests within a reasonable range (cholesterol, triglycerides, or what have you)

Basically, identify a series of key metrics that correlate well with low healthcare costs and use that group as your starter for a deductible. From there, add additional costs for those that move outside of the range. Toss in significant costs for ER visits. Keep Urgent Care costs reasonable and normally scheduled doctor visits reasonable. The insurance provider should still negotiate a reasonable group rate, so that'll help keep costs down.

Put a reasonable out of pocket yearly cap on it (which really is what catastrophic insurance does), make sure that drugs are dispensed at cost (encourages switching to generics whenever possible), and so forth and we start encouraging folks to be consumers of healthcare and not users.

Posted by: Ron ap Rhys on November 4, 2010 06:38 PM
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