8/24/2013

A Better Health Care Alternative?

By way of one of the comments in an op-ed piece I posted about the other day comes this proposal for an alternative the mess that is ObamaCare called the Intelligent Healthcare Savings Account.

While I don't agree with every aspect of the Intelligent HSA, I find it to be a more palatable alternative because it is market driven and more flexible than either our existing health/insurance system or ObamaCare.

The current business model of taking the money out of the hands of the patient before the service is rendered (and giving it to the insurance industry) promotes the current “buffet mentality”. That is a guarantee to increase utilization inappropriately. “If my money has already been taken for health care, then I want to spend it, dammit!” If you applied the same business model for food (which is just as basic a need) as we do for health care, the model would seem preposterous. If you had the employer take money out of the employee’s paycheck to pay for “food insurance”, had the employees make a co-pay at the restaurant or supermarket and then let the waiter or supermarket employee give advice to the consumer (why buy ground beef when you could get filet mignon!), the supermarket shelves would be empty and the restaurant inventory would be barren. If you thought obesity was a problem now, it would be more than epidemic in such a business model. We have that same “obesity” in our current health care model.

Is it perfect? No. But it is a heck of a lot better than what we're doing now and orders of magnitude better than ObamaCare.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.