Keith Hennessey is a former advisor to President Bush who writes on insurance matters at KeithHennesy.com In a pair of recent posts he offers first a critique of President Obama's health care reform proposals and second a compelling alternative, the essence of which is incorporated into the Ryan-Coburn proposal crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Tom Coburn. Hennessey writes:
President Obama is correct that the underlying problem with health care is rising costs. Because of this problem, your paycheck grows more slowly, millions of Americans cannot afford to buy health insurance, and the escalating costs of Medicare and Medicaid will force enormous tax increases onto you and your children. The President wants to slow the growth of health care spending, and so do I. Congress has gone in the opposite direction. Rather than changing incentives to reduce the cost of health insurance, they are trying to shift those costs onto someone else: you. The facts are not in dispute. The bill being developed in the House of Representatives would mean:
- No reduction in the growth of average private health insurance premiums;
- More than $1 trillion of new government spending over the next decade;
- $239 billion more debt in the short run, with ever-increasing additions to the deficit forever; and
- More than $500 billion of tax increases, including higher income tax rates on successful small businesses.
The better approach, Hennessey argues, is to make health insurance companies compete for individual clients as do automobile insurance companies:
While others offer you the hollow promise of government-provided and underfunded health care security, I'm telling you that you're going to have to take more responsibility for decisions about your own health. A well-functioning system will offer financial incentives to keep yourself healthy, and to avoid risky behaviors that are the source of so much of the costs in today's system. You will have to spend more time talking with your doctor and making hard choices yourself, although that's far preferable to spending that time fighting with your insurer or with a government bureaucracy.
You will have to shop intelligently for health insurance and decide what tradeoffs make sense for your family situation. You will have lower insurance premiums but more financial responsibility for relatively minor medical costs, and you can have a tax-free reserve fund that you can spend wisely on everyday non-critical medical expenses.
It means more personal responsibility and control, and less dependence on the government. It means your health security comes from you buying insurance to protect your family against catastrophe, rather than hoping the government won't ration your care when it's needed. Others want to tell you that you have the right to have someone else pay for your health insurance. I think you have the responsibility to provide for your family's health security, and that it's government's job to set rules so that you have affordable options, and to subsidize the poorest who cannot afford basic catastrophic protection.
The right kind of health care reform means your wages will grow faster as insurance premium growth slows. It means portable health insurance that you can take with you from one job to another, so you don't get locked into your current job because you're afraid to lose your health insurance. It means that millions more Americans will be insured because premiums are less expensive and the uninsured can better afford to buy it, not because we are shifting those costs onto other hard-working Americans and small businesses through higher taxes. It means no increase in the short-term budget deficit. It means dramatic reductions in unsustainable long-term budget deficits, rather than the explosive deficit increases contained in the current legislation.
Hennesey's follow-up post in which he lays out what congress should and should not do about health care reform can be read here. This is very helpful stuff and everyone concerned about the current debate over health care should take the time to read it.
Thanks to Hot Air for the links.
RLC
