Obama's Deficit Neutral Plan

Obama has stated that he wants a deficit neutral healthcare plan. Ok, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he really does want a deficit neutral healthcare plan (which means that Congress will have to scrap that 1.2 trillion dollar mess that they called healthcare reform) and let’s assume that he sticks to his guns and will not sign any type of healthcare reform that doesn’t fit this criteria. Well, shouldn’t that make us “fiscal conservatives” happy? No! The reason this shouldn’t make anyone happy let alone the fiscal conservatives in the room happy is because of this one fact, our current healthcare obligations are ALREADY too high!

I’m a huge supporter of having healthcare reform and the one thing that President Obama has right is that if we continue the status quo, we will end up bankrupting ourselves (thanks Medicaid and Medicare). One of the major aspects of any type of healthcare reform is that not only does it have to be deficit neutral; it has to go way beyond that. It has to be deficit reducing. It is not good enough to pass a healthcare bill that will have us continue down this road of bankruptcy. We have to have a plan that lowers the costs of overall healthcare. I have been debating back and forth with various people of all walks of life Republicans, Democrats and independents alike concerning what would be the best approach in bringing down healthcare costs. This is why I truly believe in a free market approach in bringing down the current system. People forget that capitalism IS NOT business friendly. Ask any business that gone into bankruptcy or has folded, they’ll tell you how bad that sucks. Capitalism is not business friendly, its consumer friendly. It’s really not surprising when you see the correlation of our nation and how relatively wealth we are to other country and our views of capitalism. If we want to continue to follow this path of prosperity, we also need to continue follow the path of this great capitalistic experiment we call the “American Dream” and that applies to the healthcare industry as well as it does to all the others.

Healthcare Around the World

Here is a link to a CNN article that briefly talks about the different healthcare systems around the world. Granted, they don't mention the Sweden or Singapore models but remember even with those models, there are downfalls. Healthcare is a difficult issue that carries with it an enormous amount of unintended consequences. We need to be open to novel ideas, borrowed ideas from other models and using those ideas that have worked for us here.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/10/global.healthcare.wrap/index.html

Evidence Based Medicine

One the ways we can truly improve the quality of health care is by having doctors, especially family practitioners use what is called "evidence based medicine." Having worked, shadowed and studied along side hundreds of doctors myself, I have noticed that many do not follow this one approach to diagnosing patients. It takes a lot of work to keep up on the new research of the day and continually working on following what is truly working in clinical trials and other practices around the country. Below is an op-ed piece that I found quite interesting. It compares baseball to health care bringing up this idea of evidence based medicine.

http://tinyurl.com/mrj3fv