The Right to Health - A Holistic Health Plan: 2008-16

While both sides of the aisle agree that minimizing costs is a critical component in any health plan, few plans provide specifics to achieve that objective. Current programs provide or extend insurance coverage to the uninsured and those for whom procurement is not feasible, divest employers of a coverage requirement and vest it, instead, in individuals. This procedure would substantially add costs - without commensurate return. At the outset, cost-savings of buying insurance in bulk - by several thousand employers - would disappear, replaced by costs of handling hundreds of millions of individual policies. One can only imagine the staff needed to handle/process applications numbering several orders of magnitude more than the current load, plus the additional bureaucratic layers to police legal requirements. This plan suggests preserving the status quo regarding insurance where it is working. It recommends the objective of maximizing care, not coverage, for the currently uninsured. It is a market driven plan, favoring incentives and practices that maximize profits to physicians who demonstrate results in terms of wellness/improvement of their patient population. The plan suggests that government assume non-medical infrastructure costs, similar to other low-profit operations that do not lend themselves to private enterprise, while protecting the practice of medicine from outside intervention. It does away with practices allowing profits to accrue to non-medical owners. Instead, it creates a "federally run health facility" where rental and administrative costs, supplies, laboratory services and basic diagnostic machines are assumed by the government or shared by the medical members invited to join, lowering overhead and maximizing profits. In exchange, physicians donate a portion of their increased income as medical care to the uninsured. The plan also broadens those allowed to perform routine health services and selects specified diseases, especially diseases of the aging, for focus of research and treatment.