WASHINGTON – The Republican health care proposal introduced by House Speaker Paul Ryan this week does nothing to fix the root cause of high premiums and even higher deductibles for health care insurance. A piece in the Daily Caller lays out a simply solution of what real reform should look like – and a hint, it emphasizes a the necessity of legitimate medical service pricing.
The solution: Legitimate pricing of medical services
Congress must compel medical providers to play by the same rules that apply to all other sellers of consumer goods and services. They should remain free to set their own prices. However, providers should be prohibited from billing each patient a different price for the same service. We all pay the same amount for a gallon of milk at the neighborhood grocery.
Legitimate pricing means:
- Networks would be obsolete. We could use any healthcare provider in the nation without being price gouged for being out-of-network.
- Everyone could shop any medical procedure online and see real prices.
- Wide-open free market competition, virtually overnight, will reduce U.S. health expenditures by a minimum of 33% (and the USA would still have approximately the highest cost per person healthcare on earth).
- Disposable income and prosperity would boom.
- The U.S. deficit would shrink.
- U.S. manufacturing would be more competitive, stimulating job creation.
How did the greatest nation on earth develop such a tortured healthcare system? Two words: crony capitalism. The industry spends more on lobbying than the defense, aerospace, and the oil and gas industries combined.
Because this ‘reform’ fails to require legitimate pricing of medical services it will fail spectacularly — exactly like Obamacare.
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