How to Fix Health Care without bankrupting the country

WE DO NOT HAVE A HEALTH CARE CRISIS. WE HAVE A HEALTH INSURANCE CRISIS.

I have a plan and its brilliance is in its simplicity. It is a 5 pronged approach, with each prong dependent on the other 4.

1. Tort Reform - malpractice premiums are killing us. Frivolous lawsuits and ridiculous jury "punitive" awards have driven malpractice insurance costs through the roof. Yet Obama talks about greedy doctors.
2. Restructure of the Health Insurance business to return to insuring against catastrophic losses, not every toothache and sore throat.
3. Health Savings Accounts for all Americans. (See discourse on that )
4. Eliminate Employer sponsored health insurance. Everyone buys their own insurance, using employer contributions (that used to go to the insurance company) to their HSAs, plus their own insurance deductions that used to come out of their paycheck. Then they buy the insurance that best suits their needs. The Customer is in control.
5. Put the purchasing power and decisions back in the hands of the American people instead of the federal government. Contrary to popular belief, we do not need the federal government taking care of us. Government just makes a mess of everything for everyone.

How they will all work together is discussed below

Tort Reform - no plan to reduce health care costs can be considered to be serious without addressing tort reform and putting a cap on the punitive damages, which is where the trial lawyers get rich. Obama would do better to squeeze the lawyers than the doctors. But since the Trial Lawyers are the Democrats biggest campaign contributors (along with the NEA and UAW), Obama isn’t interested in tort reform. Hypocrisy - thy name is Obama.

He claims to be looking out for those who are injured and protecting their awards. . . oh, go get out the violin. Most malpractice suits are less about real injury than about a big pay day. However, if a case does have actual merit, the “victim” is well taken care of with the compensatory damages, which would not need to be capped because they have to be justified by actual evidence. Punitive damages are completely arbitrary, have little if anything to do with the facts of the case, and emotion based and are frequently awarded by juries with the collective IQ of a toad.

What Obama fails to acknowledge is that if malpractice awards go down, so do the malpractice insurance premiums which have been so ruinous to the health care system in America. Doctors’ rates will come down dramatically, as will the costs for the drugs, as Big Pharma won’t have to prepare for losing Billions of dollars if a drug turns out to have side effects that couldn’t have been known before mass distribution. I’ll bet this alone would lower medical costs by 1/3, since doctors could also quit practicing "defensive medicine".

The punitive damage award is what needs to be limited. People today act like they want something to go wrong so they can sue. It’s like hitting the lottery! Smarmy personal injury lawyers convince gullible, sympathetic jurors to stick it to fill in the blank - - the doctor, the hospital, the drug company. Especially the drug companies, who have been so successfully demonized by the Democrats that they have become almost as hated as lawyers! Punish that evil pharmaceutical company by sending them a message!” And the jury awards a gazillion dollars to the “victim” - or more accurately, his lawyer.

And prescription drugs go up another $100 because the drug company has to recover that gazillion dollars from somewhere. You and I pay the costs of punitive damage awards, not the drug companies. And collectively, these excessive jury awards have just about bankrupted our health care industry!

WE MUST HAVE TORT REFORM NOW!