Free Market Healthcare Reform

Free Market Healthcare Reform

With health insurance companies being the bane of Americans, it seems silly to suggest that the private sector play a role in fixing the healthcare system, but it must be done. ...
Kurt Williamsen

A great healthcare debate is happening in America over whether the healthcare system should be improved via tweaking ObamaCare — a methodology that the new GOP-designed healthcare plan, dubbed the American Health Care Act, seems to be following — or whether an entirely new system should be created. This is one of a series of five articles about how the healthcare system could be changed. The first article, "Healthcare: Which Fix Should We Follow?", explains the goals that a healthcare system should shoot to achieve and lists the four main types of reforms available to the country. The other four articles, including this one, give background and facts about each type of reform and how many goals it would secure. The other articles are entitled "ObamaCare Unraveled," "Government-run Healthcare," and "Does Single-payer Signal a Solution?"

To begin with, in any discussion about the government allowing the private sector to reform healthcare, it should be noted that it is understandable why some Americans have a gut-wrenching visceral reaction against allowing the private sector to try to fix the healthcare system: Insurance companies surely aren’t much in the way of friends of the sick, the poor, or the elderly; insurance companies played a large part in getting us to the disastrous state of healthcare we’re in now; the elderly feel they have pre-paid for Medicare via deductions from their paychecks — and now often desperately need help paying medical bills; and the poor don’t want to rely on private charity for medical care.

Right now, quite frankly, health insurance is a rip-off. Not only is the average premium for family coverage $17,545 per year for employer-sponsored plans in 2016, according to the Kaiser Foundation and Health Research and Educational Trust, but the deductibles, which average between $1,200 and $2,000 per person, depending on the type of plan, could easily lead to a family going broke — literally. And then there are co-payments to deal with.

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