This is one of the best articles you’re going to read on the topic of health care, and unsurprisingly it’s by Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute. It was published at the Forbes website — here are three short excerpts:
What we need is a new conversation. The hubris of Obamacare was that Democrats thought they could re-engineer one sixth of the economy with one bill. After 2,800 pages of legislation and more than 20,000 pages of regulation, it is clear that this approach is wrong for America.
[…]
What is needed most is for leaders to paint a picture of how their approach to health reform would differ from what the Democrats have offered through Obamacare. If Republicans were to back one unified bill before explaining their vision and principles, we would get bogged down in legislative details, and the American people would become more confused than ever. And that, of course, is exactly what Democrats want to see to take the focus off of ObamaCare’s failures.
[…]
In a properly-functioning market, millions of people make billions of choices every day about what they do, where they go, and how they spend their money. Everyone offering a service or a product in the market gets these signals, and the market responds by providing consumers with more of what they want and less of what they don’t. Why on earth would Americans want a system, especially with something as personal as health care, where all of these market signals are lost, and doctors and patients are responding to regulators, not consumers?
While health care is different than other sectors of our economy and requires special consideration, there are many areas where consumers can and want to have more control over their health care choices – especially around the kind of health insurance policy they want and how much they are willing to pay.
Competition could work if consumers were truly engaged as partners in getting better value for their health care dollars.Government needs to get out of the way, not build more barriers.
All of these ideas need to be explained in more detail, but here’s our basic checklist for a Step-by-Step Approach to Health Reform…
