There are 2 alternatives to health care that have not been looked at properly. The first is a health care savings account (HSA) and the other is eliminating the insurance company entirely from the health care equation. Interested?
What is an HSA?: An HSA is an actual account that is used solely for the purpose of health care related purchases. Depending on what rules the government places on it, it can be used to pay for doctor’s visits, medications, vitamins and even pay your monthly premium to the insurance company of your choice. The ideal version of this system is an HSA account that is portable so that if you leave one job for another, you don't loose that health care coverage. Currently, most HSA's are set up by an employer where they take a certain amount of money and place it into the account for the employees use with regard to health care. It does not force an employee (under most circumstances) to use the health insurance paid for by the employer. An HSA also frees up the employer from having to provide health insurance thus they also save money.
Under an ideal HSA: In this "ideal" system, your bank would have a special HSA savings account which you would give your employer access to so they can deposit a certain amount of money in monthly. You, the owner of the account can have the bank set aside a certain portion of your paycheck or a percentage of your account to go into the HSA account if you don't want your employer depositing money directly into the account. Under the second scenario, you decide how much is put in, but say you need that money for something else? In order to transfer money from an HSA to a regular savings account or even a checking account a certain amount would be allowed to be transferred at any given time. So you might be able to take $20 a day and put it into your regular account without any further penalty.
What is good about an HSA is that it would earn interest over time so that you can save up for what medical costs you might encounter as you age. It under the ideal scenario will be able to pay for health insurance costs, doctor visit costs, and all medicines with some over the counter medicines. But, unlike traditional insurance where we cannot see the costs, we can see them under this system. As such we can endeavor to save money for only the necessary procedures rather than spend on elective costs that would drain the account. Will it solve the entire problem of health care? No. But it will help in solving the issue of people going bankrupt due to medical costs if they should loose their jobs.
Eliminate the middle man: There is one additional idea that is ignored, and that is making a monthly payment to the doctor instead of an insurance company. In this type of health care, you have your primary care physician and you pay him/her a monthly fee to treat you when you are sick regardless of the costs to treat you. Why does this work? Well that is due to the fact that all money that would have gone to the insurance company is now going toward your doctor instead and as such every treatment and test that your doctor does (and even his/her partners) is covered by that monthly fee. The only time you are charged however is if you walk in without an appointment and that is really the only time. This idea I got from a doctor interviewed on the show Huckabee, hosted by former Governor Mike Huckabee. The doctor interviewed owned his own hospital and charged his patients $75 a month with that number slowly decreasing as more people signed up for this alternative to health insurance. If his patients were a walk in (came in without an appointment) he would charge them something like $16 dollars. This interview occurred in 2008 after President Obama was elected and conservatives were looking every where for innovative alternatives to the system that the President was proposing, of which, this idea was one of them. While it may not do anything for drugs, unless the doctor’s office has its own pharmacy, it is a great alternative to health insurance which may limit what procedures you are allowed to get and at what cost.
Conclusion: These two ideas may be used in tandem, and for the most part, the HSA one is a reality, though is limited by certain rules and restrictions. By freeing up the HSA system and allowing more doctors freedom to team up and offer an out to the insurance companies, we may see a drop in health care as apparently if health insurance goes away, costs may decrease by as much as 50%. So let us get back our freedom of choice with respect to health care, and make it personal again between the us and our doctors. All we have to do is free up parts of the system to make it work, while getting the insurance companies and the government lackeys who manipulate and are manipulated off our backs.
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