Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi Will Never Go Along With This...

I keep reading more and more articles and arguments about health care reform. Blame is being thrown all around, but nobody really seems to be doing any pragmatic analysis. All sides say, "It absolutely has to be this way, or that way..."; maybe it can be another way.

Opponents point to Medicare and its glaring abuses and inefficiencies as a good reason to avoid a “public option”, and I agree, especially when there's another option. It's called group coverage.

In looking at the money being spent on Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as the money being lost by hospitals and others who are forced to treat indigents and then just absorb the losses, it seems to me that it would be cheaper all around, if instead of building a whole new government controlled bureaucracy, with it's startup, implementation and administration costs, we, instead, take something that's already in place and use it to it's best advantage to solve our problems.

Group insurance policies are what most businesses use to cover their employees. The bigger the business, the bigger the group, and the smaller the individual policy premiums. Imagine a group with 250 million members. That's some serious juice. Why 'wouldn't it be possible to just sign up for the biggest group policy of all time, and have the government underwrite the premiums?

If you think about it, what's the primary reason we need medical insurance in the first place? It's because the associated costs of medical treatment have become too expensive for the average citizen to afford, so instead, we pay the insurance premium, and the insurance companies pay the medical bills.

Under every health care plan that's been proposed to date, the government will be paying all the medical bills. It seems to me that it would be better to just pay the premiums instead, and let the private insurance industry handle the bills the same way they always have, with a few notable exceptions; no exclusions for pre-existing conditions, no exclusions for “experimental procedures”, no exclusions for "accepted" pharmaceutical lists.

Under that policy, it would be possible to abolish Medicare, and Medicaid, with all their associated administration costs and abuses. Their former recipients would now have real health insurance. It could also take over for the Veterans Administration, and provide some real health care for our veterans. Considering the money saved by abolishing these programs alone, I think it would be doable, and provide a much better level of coverage than any of the public options that have been proposed.

There's lots of money to be made by the insurance industry, so we put the program up for competitive bids every 2 years; if they're providing real health care, for every man woman and child in the United States, and our Military, who the Hell care how much money the industry makes?

Copays could be established at a reasonable level for everyone, and waived for those up to, say, 150% of the current poverty level, and then graduated to those at 400% of the current poverty level. Since the biggest impediment to retirement for the average worker is concerns about health insurance and it's associated premiums, at 55 years of age, regardless of income, all copays could be waived, allowing for earlier, and more secure retirement.

Pharmaceuticals could be purchased at huge volume discounts and distributed on an non-profit basis; research and development costs could be underwritten as well, making the drugs much cheaper, even for name brand drugs. Other countries who have traditionally profited by the same types of volume buying from US drug companies, would be charged a tariff, to offset the government's contribution to R&D.

Why not create health care reform where everybody wins, including private industry?