How to Lower Health Care Costs Without Government

Suggestion #1:

All of these offices and agencies will cost massive amounts of money to operate and generate salaries for the staff. Many of the staff and directors will be appointed by politicians and the President (you know, like their kids, their wives and their brother-in-laws?)

How much cheaper would health care be if all of the government beauracracies were eliminated and health care was strictly between the citizen and their doctor? No one else. Quite a bit cheaper.

Suggestion #2.

Doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies have to pay high premiums for insurance against excessive judgments in lawsuits. This is a cost of doing business and is added to the rates they charge patients.

Our health care system is not broken. The cost is too high. We can thank patients and their lawyers who sue for much more money than the cases justify. If Congress won’t pass TORT reform, then perhaps doctors and hospitals could adopt a policy that corrects the problem.

They could refuse to treat people who won’t sign a waiver which limits the amount of any lawsuit to a reasonable sum. It won’t prevent patients from suing and it reduces the insurance coverage required for protection against lawsuits. This allows doctors and hospitals to lower their costs to patients because their operating costs are lower.

Any doctors or hospitals who don’t want to enact this policy can continue to purchase the expensive insurance and pass that cost along to their patients. We, the citizens, will have the choice, then, to pay higher doctor and hospital costs to retain the right to sue for exorbitant amounts or we can choose doctors and hospitals with lower costs, knowing that we can sue for malpractice and receive a lower more reasonable settlement.

Pharmaceutical companies can print the waiver on their drug packages warning that purchase of their drug constitutes an agreement by the purchaser that they can not sue for more than the amounts on a chart at the company web site. The charts can also be available for the asking at the pharmacy selling the drugs. Consumers can ask to see the charts before they make a purchase. Pharmaceuticals who don’t wish to participate, can continue marketing expensive drugs and carrying expensive insurance protection. Again, the consumers have choices.

These suggestions should be successful because most consumers do not sue for unreasonable amounts. Furthermore, competition for consumers will bring about lower costs. This is just a first attempt to solve some of the problems we face with health care. We have to start somewhere.

If you like these ideas, please leave your feedback here.