Credit for this goes to the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels blog.  I wish I could have come up with this, I agree 100% and? It’s nowhere near the ridiculous gobbledygook that comes out of Washington, DC.  They need to start following the KISS principle and stop being such insufferable, blockheaded blowhards and follow this plan:

Let’s be blunt.

There are some who want power for power’s sake.

It isn’t the money that draws them – and due to their age or health, there are some who won’t live long enough to see to fruition this bill they are panicing to pass that won’t go into effect for 4 more years.

You did get that?

4 years. This is the crisis right?

No.

This is all about having government take over and run even more of our lives. How much you can eat, how much you should exercise (doubt me – look up S. 1060 the obesity control bill) how you should be covered, and decision making made by the perennially wise people who have seriously messed up every guess they have made in the past.

So, the challenge:

A friend, who was interviewing myself and my wife for a story asked me for solutions instead of just hammering on the Health Care proposal. Ok – here we go:

1. Tort reform – limit pain and suffering except for defined cases such as wrongful death or wrongful amputation, etc. Simply put a cap on the amount that people can get for something as simple as leaving a piece of gauze inside them. This isn’t limiting the financial damages such as loss of work time or things that can be tangibly proven. One other benefit that states that are implementing this system are seeing is that doctors aren’t fleeing the state due to malpractice overload, and that even helps reduce the cost due to competition. One cost that people don’t see is that each and every product, pill, piece of equipment, doctor, nurse, PA and the clinic as a whole has malpractice insurance BUILT in to the cost of seeing your doctor. If you step off the scale wrong and sue Toledo scale company – you think they don’t know that could happen and have insurance? That cost gets passed on to the doctors, and then to you. If we could trim 1/2 the cost of malpractice insurance on EACH layer being passed on to us, the amount of money we would save would be far larger than I think people understand.
2. Loser pays – Simply – if you sue someone, and it is frivolous or it is a really shaky case, the person or company who is getting sued should not have to pay to defend itself. The loser of the case pays all legal fees. This will result in far fewer cases, tie up the court dockets far less (speeding up all other proceedings) and cost companies (especially insurance companies who are insuring medical companies/people) far less, reducing costs.  If people aren’t having to pay to defend themselves vs. spiteful people who sue just because they can and to punish someone, not for wrongdoing, but simply to harm – the insurance costs they pay goes down and so do yours.
3. Free college -with a hook- the government wants to pay for medical school. Great. That will get more doctors, nurses, radiologists, etc. into practice increasing competition. Part of the reason costs are so high is that there is a scarcity of doctors and nurses – if they were around like every 7-11, that wouldn’t be the case, especially with the idea of the cost menus you’ll see below. The student could pay back the student loan as usual (10 years), be a part of government service (say work in a clinic in a depressed area at a lower wage, maybe living on premises in an apartment) for 10 years or a combination – if they can work for 3 years at the clinic and get a job offer where they can then pay back the 7 year balance. One thing – instead of making the student go through a loan program every single year – for any medical profession, make it a blanket loan – and make the school receiving it guarantee the costs won’t go up to get all the money up front – including books.
4. Streamline the FDA procedures – stop the mumbo jumbo of years and years of testing that has failed us miserably anyway. Put together a board of 5 top research scientists from competing universities or programs, 5 top physicians and 5 top pharmaceutical company people that must not have ANY ties together – they must be competitors. Have them come up with a program to test the drugs in an efficient manner that will cut costs and time. This will, inevitably, cut costs to us. This will also speed more drugs in the same genres of drugs (say cancer treatments) to the market faster, spurring competition and SAVING LIVES much more rapidly. The panel, made up of experts and not bureaucrats would design a test procedure that would be better and thereby safer as well.
5. Stop the requirement that these companies publish this information in magazines and such – I can’t find one person that reads all that little medical crap -but it costs the pharmaceuticals hundreds of thousands if not millions each year. Put it on the website and if they want to advertise – make them put the info page up on the ad in big bold print through the whole commercial so people who want can see the side effects and such.
6. In conjunction with stopping a lot of the waste in lawsuits – we could then begin to cut admin costs due to not having to have so many compliance people walking around making sure for the 11th time that everything was correct. CYA is good – being asked 12 times if you are allergic on the way to the operating room is insane.
7. Make hospitals, doctors, clinics, insurance companies and such post prices and reviews online for everyone to see, easily. Make the same information available to people who call. If the customer goes to see a PA at a local clinic and they need an operation – the PA should be able to put the procedure needed into a clearinghouse of information that is funded by the doctors, clinics, hospitals and insurance companies in order to be able to come back into the room with the customer and present estimates of cost from local area options – say within the radius that the person can travel. They can do this for hundreds of thousands of hotels, plane fares, rental cars and for hundreds of thousands of options for each – they can and should make this information available to customers.
8. The same people – doctors, insurance et al, must also pay to fund national repositories of information – servers in other words – that are mirrored in several locations around the country to protect the integrity of the whole system, so that patient information does not have to be regathered at each step of the way, preventing retesting costs and initial doctor visit costs being inflated due to having to spend a lot of time gathering the same info over and over. For a small fee that goes into that same fund, people can buy a flash drive (say the cost of the drive plus a 50.00 fee) to be able to access their own info and download it to carry it around with them in case of emergency. This info would include all their visits to doctors, xrays, cat scans, mri, blood work, etc.   For a larger fee, there could be an option for each patient to carry their own info and not have it in the repository – BUT they would have to sign that they understand that they are responsible for the loss of their info and if there is retesting to be done because they lost it, they would have to pay 100% of the cost. However – people could store their files on multiple sites (multiple flash drives, hard drives, diff computers, etc.)
9. Switch all government paperwork to non paper systems. Period. Help the environment and cut costs while helping efficiency and cutting labor required, saving more money.
10. Have harsh penalties for proven waste and fraud on the government system (medicaid, medicare) that is in place right now – ranging from 5,000.00 up. All monies to go into locked fund earning interest for uninsured patients. For multiple counts of the same waste that is shown to be a certain fraud, or judgment of fraud from a court – the minimum penalty would be 100,000.00 per instance. This would be actually taking someone who IS proven greedy and evil and punishing THEM and not the rest of us.
11. Allow interstate competition of insurance companies. Have a central clearinghouse of a menu driven system with every option having costs assigned – from number of people to each person’s information. If need be, allow a central quotation request system if a menuing system won’t work – allow any company/coop to be able to submit in ONE form to EVERY group/company/agency their request for insurance quotes. This would not only help insurance companies drop costs by not having to advertise so much to get clients but also allow people to drive costs down with competition. Companies would have to submit costs blindly and have those costs fixed for a period of time to make sure there was no collusion in pricing.
12. If there is a lawsuit for a preventable error of a defined grievous error, then the doctor/medical worker must not only pay a fine (into the same locked box for uninsured medical expenses) but have their license revoked if the crime is harsh enough and be registered on a national database that is accessible by anyone about what they have done and that they are no longer recognized as a person who is licensed to practice medicine in any location in the United States.
13. Reduce the length of time a medication can be protected (ONLY if all other cost cutting measures are put in place – they need the protection to make enough money to handle ALL the other costs) from going to generic by half.
14. Provide generous tax allowances to companies like WalMart, Kmart, Target, etc for putting or continuing low cost clinics in their stores.
15. Start spending the billions the government spends on pork on the top 50 medical research schools as ranked by an independent source. Have a fund available of 20-30 billion – parcel it out equally. Quit making the schools twist in the wind and spend tens to hundreds of hours to try to get measly funds. Maybe make the funding switch from schools that receive it this year to different schools next year in order to spread it around more. This could not be spent on millions on a salary for one teacher – this is for research COSTS alone – facilities, equipment, chemicals, etc. – NOT for salaries.
16. Spend more of the pork for the same idea in science alone – to 50 schools in science and engineering – 20-30 billion in research grants – rotate the list every year. (each school would have to meet minimum requirements for being on the list – but that amount of money would easily last each school say 2-3 years). Once again – the money is for costs alone and not salaries.
17. Limit lawyers in class action suits to 10% of the recovery for their fee (if they win a 100 million dollar case for example, they don’t get but a measly 10 million) and 10% for expenses. Period. The rest goes to the plantiffs – so the people who are victims don’t get victimized by their own mouthpieces – something we as Americans should be ashamed that we allow anyway. The government established fee limits on Social Security lawyers, so the precedent is there. (This would also stop the propagation of ads and stupid lawsuits – lowering costs to us in the long run and freeing up court dockets even more)

There you go – minimum costs – could be implemented FAR sooner than 2013 and would help more Americans be able to afford insurance, health costs, have lower deductibles, and Medicaid and Medicare would cost less.

This would bring more competition and doctors into the fold, and allow most of the steps to be self funded by the industry.

Also with steps 15 and 16, we could expect more people to go into research and development and see far more advances than we have been seeing. Of course it would mean that the Congress might have to suck it up on some of their earmarks – but you know what – if they could tie themselves and their names into saving lives, wouldn’t that be worth it?

You’d think this might catch someone’s attention wouldn’t you?

Please – I’m begging each and everyone who reads this – print it and fax it to their two Senators, their Congressional Rep and the White House – there is a print button on the page right beneath this article.

Maybe we can let them know there are alternatives and that other people have ideas that don’t involve takeover.

I will be sending this to at least two senators…will you?