Healthcare Reform

In the great healthcare debate currently reverberating throughout the hallowed halls of our nation’s Capitol and throughout our living rooms, offices, and Facebook pages, we are constantly reminded that more than half of all bankruptcies are the result of unpaid medical bills and that approximately one and a half million Americans lose their homes every year because they can’t afford their medical expenses. We’re told that 64.4 million Americans under the age of 65 spend more than ten percent of their income on healthcare, and we’re led to believe that only a complete retooling of America’s healthcare system can right these wrongs. But 64.4 million is only about 20% of Americans. Only one half of one percent of Americans will lose their homes due to insurmountable medical bills, in any given year, and only one tenth of one percent of all Americans will be forced into bankruptcy. Isn’t there some way to help these people, without bankrupting our nation trying to provide complete medical coverage to every man, woman, boy, and girl in the United States?

I’m neither an economist nor a healthcare professional, and I certainly haven’t followed the healthcare debate as closely as many others have, but I can’t help but think that, in our nation’s rush to divide along polarized party lines, there must be at least one or two viable options we’ve ignored. A recent study by the Labor Department found that the average American consumer spends 5.7% of his or her paycheck on healthcare (one third what the average consumer spends on transportation). And it seems reasonable to assume that the average consumer isn’t bankrupted by those costs and won't lose his or her home. So why couldn’t the government implement healthcare reform specifically designed to help people who spend more than a certain percentage of their annual income (perhaps based on a person’s tax bracket) on healthcare?

Essentially, what I’m suggesting is that—rather than paying for every man, woman, boy, and girl in the United States of America to run to the doctor and then the pharmacy every time they get the sniffles—the U.S. government look into adopting affordable major medical coverage as the public option. This could provide not only an option for people who can’t afford full coverage and don’t want to see their lives ruined by medical bills; it could also provide an option for employers who can’t afford to offer full coverage to their employees.

By offering this coverage as both a standalone health insurance plan and as a supplement to private health insurance, the government would allow private insurance companies to offer cheaper coverage to people who already have the government major medical plan. For example, a person earning $30,000 a year might be covered, under the subsidized government plan, for any treatments or procedures costing more than $3,000 in a given year. And that person could still purchase private health insurance (at a significantly lower rate than currently available) to help cover expenses that fall below that $3,000 government deductible.

It’s clearly not a perfect or fully thought out plan, but I think it has potential. Yes, it would still result in a significant burden on the U.S. government, but that burden would likely be tens or hundreds of billions of dollars less than the plan currently before Congress.