My Daughter Rachael
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Better Health Care Access without Furthering National Debt
Congress, the President and the New York appointed Senator want to expand a Medicare-based system for "Universal Health Care". This will further lob on additional national debt and inflation.
Medicare, in most objective reports, is imploding. Instead, we need to reduce the Medicare and Medicaid pool and increase the access to more highly regulated private insurance options. These regulations will include capping monthly premiums:
- Family at $700 to start
- Individual at $275 to start
We need to cap liability insurance for providers and cap tort claims to offset that.
The bottom line is that while the Congress and Senate argue over single payer, Medicare models, and socialized medicine, we still have nothing. My idea is to have a stepping stone approach.
When you factor in insured’s across this country and cap even modestly, the billions in dollars in the pockets of the public and businesses is a free-to-taxpayer Economic Stimulus Package that keeps on giving. The factor that is preventing this in part is the $50 million in lobbying money from the insurance industry to your Congressman/woman and Senators. Go to opensecrets.org to check that out.
We need action now and all the career politicians in this race for US Senate will never agree to do what I want to do above. The only way to make this work is to vote in those that will and vote out those that won't. I am not and have no intention of being a career politician.
In my own practice, we keep fees modest, overhead low and compensation fair. Patient personal responsibility and better public health involvement is crucial also. Health education at the middle school level is very important.
Having a special needs daughter (autistic, seizure disorder, developmental delay, and mild cerebral palsy) makes me especially aware of needed improvements in schools and funding for prevention of autism.
A public option for now cannot be carte blanche. If you want your bunions removed or other elective surgery, we cannot provide that in a public option others are touting. When obesity, smoking and alcohol/substance abuse costs are contained better, we can start to do more. We have $55 Trillion dollars not counted in the budget as unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security. In the meantime, watch your premiums rise; Schumer and Gillibrand both take large donations from the insurance industry and there's a reason for that. There is no coincidence.
Working folks like myself need to pay for policies that are not linked to jobs, no pre-existing conditions, and have no massively high deductibles. The incentive for the "better" plans is to work and pay for the plan. If you are unfortunately out of work for no blame of your own, you will have some coverage. There are also those who choose not to work also or are unemployable for various reasons excepting legitimate disabilities; my daughter is disabled and will likely never work in a completely mainstream job. We will be paying for them also for minimal coverage. The problem still remains that we have too few doctors and nurses to care for additional people and there will be long wait times if the option happens. That is verified by physicians in Family Practice and Internal medicine that I have spoken to, as well as articles by these providers.