Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Triple level vouchers for health insurance (just a lame idea?)

One way to avoid mandates and to means test subsidization at the same time (means testing inherent with the mandate proposals) might be to force insurance companies to break coverage up into three (just for the sake of argument) components covering say, family doctor visits, specialist visits and catastrophic (a.k.a., house insurance) and issue vouchers for one, two or three according to means. Maybe you could even apply vouchers toward whichever component you wanted if you didn't get all three.

I don't know anything about health insurance structures but this might give somebody and idea. All this is until we get sense and go for Medicare for All...

...you know, Medicare for All: just the right program to take advantage of the (FDR/depression type) groundswell to do something, already first-choice in polls and fireproof against the usual Republican nonsense because everybody is already looking forward to it for their own old age (when they will need insurance the most)...

...that's right, Medicare for All: the program that frees up doctor's time to keep as current as possible with the explosion of medical knowledge instead of dribbling away their time dealing with 100+ provider sets of rules and fighting off 100+ care deniers.

For some reason all the above common sense is supposed to be impossible to slip past insurance interests. Funny; if Hill had just gone the Medicare for All route the first time (when the depression type groundswell had not even built up yet) she probably would have gotten it through. I suspect Obama knows all this; he hopefully being the first president we'll have with a real brain since Nixon (and going back through Hoover).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good words.