What If Grocery Shopping Worked Like Health Care?

Watch this quick video and see what you think. H/T

SEVERAL IDEAS FOR REFORM for a better health-care system:

1. Make health insurance more like other types of insurance.

You don't buy car insurance to cover your purchases of gas or tune-ups or home insurance for a quick paint job, but health insurance is now supposed to be for e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g from a physical exam to cancer care. This is unrealistic and unsustainable; it covers far too much. Health savings accounts which passed as part of the Medicare reforms of 2003, were an important first step in separating smaller, routine expenses from the costs of catastrophic events. However the legislation is overly rigid. Congress must expand and revise the structure of health savings accounts.

2. Foster competetion.

American health care is the most regulated sector of the economy. The result? A health-insurance policy for a 30-year-old man costs four times more in New York than in neighboring Connecticut because of the multitude of regulations in the Empire State. Americans can shop out --of-state for a mortgage; they should be able to do the same thing for health insurance.

Greater competetion is needed in all medical consumption to lower prices.

3. Make it as easy as possible for people to get coverage.

It's difficult for small businesses to make health-insurance decisions for their employees. Elected officials in Washington should make things easier by allowing association health plans---where different businesses can work together to buy insurance. And health insurance exchanges could also be useful, but should be implemented at the state level.

4. Directly help the uninsured poor.

While the issue of the uninusred is much more complicated than typically presented and presumed---roughly 9 million so-called uninsured are not citizens and another 10 million uninsured have the income to buy insurance but opt not to buy---some Americans do indeed fall through the cracks. Presently the federal government spends billions on uncompensated care by funding hospitals. THAT MONEY SHOULD BE TURNED OVER TO THE STATES TO LET THEM EXPERIMENT WITH DIRECTLY HELPING THE UNINSURED POOR WHO CAN'T PAY (as opposed to the uninsured who can pay but don't), for example, through voucher programs for private insurance or to pay their deductibles for private insurance. States could also use the money to help establish high-risk pools for the chronically ill.

----David Gratzer, Why Obama's Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster

More tomorrow.