Bush, Congress could have avoided Obamacare
There is a fundamental truth overlooked in the rhetoric over Medicaid, mandates, subsidies, accessibility and taxes: Free markets would turn our ailing health care system into a dynamic, innovative cornucopia of better and ever more affordable care for all.
There are impressive examples of what the private sector is capable of providing us if government barriers were removed.
Take a product from Stryker, one of the world’s largest medical device companies. Its SurgiCount scanners address the problem of “retained” surgical sponges. Despite being considered a “never event,” surgical sponges are left inside patients about a dozen times a day in the USA. A single incident costs about $600,000 in corrective surgery, indemnity payments and legal settlements. SurgiCount avoids all that by electronically tracking the sponges used in an operation, rather than leaving that to chance in a manual count by harried operating room surgeons and nurses.
Innovation can be seen at the retail level as drug store chains Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid push further into health care delivery. The journal Hospitals &
Health Networks reported that this push will continue “to put pressure on traditional providers to ‘up their game’ on access — or partner.” What Hospitals &
Health Networks didn’t say is that it would also enhance consumer access and choice.
In similar fashion, the USC Center for Body Computing ’s Virtual Care Clinic, along with eight partners, helps deliver wireless, on-demand health care to anyone with a smartphone. The system uses mobile apps, wearable sensors, data collection, “virtual” health care providers and more to connect users with USC medical expertise. USC is calling it an “anytime, anywhere” disruptive health care model to deliver “borderless health care.”
That would pair nicely with an idea some Republicans have long advocated, to permit sales of health insurance across state lines.
These are but a few examples among many, and there’d be countless more if we achieved a genuine free market system. But both parties share responsibility for higher health care costs and an all-too-inflexible system.
The Republican Party must accept some of the blame for the cost spiral that Obamacare has wrought for the past seven years. When Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House from 2003 to 2007, they could have passed many of the health care reforms they now advocate — most notably permitting nationwide shopping for insurance and greatly expanding the eligibility for tax-free health savings accounts.
Had President George W. Bush and the GOP Congress done so, it’s highly improbable that Obamacare would have seen the light of day. The same nationwide freemarket competition that holds down auto insurance premiums would have a similar effect on health insurance premiums.
More patient consumerism and choice are what’s needed, not Medicaid for all.