I am putting together a series of posts regarding my Presidential Campaign Platform. I am not actually running for President of the US for a few reasons. One reason is that I am 33. Another reason is that I have no political experience. And lastly, I am a very reasonable person who does not enjoy lying, therefore no one would ever vote for me. This is the second post in this series and it will be some ideas to fix our health care system. You can see the first post in this series here.

Our health care system has some series issues, and is in process of being completely socialized by nanny state loving Democrats. If this election goes as history tells us it will, then the Democrats will own the Congress and the White House. When the Republicans owned this, they tried to pass some common sense legislation, much of which managed to get shot down by procedures that the Democrats used to outmaneuver the Republicans. The dems didn’t step on this legislation because they thought it was a bad idea. They stepped on it because they knew it would help the system and this would prevent them from hitting their goals. Of course, the Republicans could have used a bit more leadership to get more legislation passed, but they weren’t very good at their jobs, and now some of them are working at FoxNews.

To truly be able to fix a problem, you have to truly understand the root of the problem. Everyone believes that the problem is the high price of health insurance. The truth is that the high price is actually a symptom of many other problems. Of course, many politicians want to focus on helping people with the price of premiums instead of focusing on why the premiums are so high. The price of the premiums is connected to the cost of health care. So in order to address this problem, you need to address the cost of health care. Why does the US spend twice as much per person as any other country? So much to the dismay of the Democrats who may accidentally read this, I am going to put part of my focus into bringing down the actual cost of health care.

The first thing we need to do to help the system is remove the lawyers. The dollar amount that fraudulent and high paying lawsuits adds to health care costs is a bit controversial. The reason is that we can’t really tell how much the costs are raised when doctors are actually forced out of the industry because they can’t afford to pay their malpractice insurance. It is easy to put a dollar figure on what they spend for their insurance, but we don’t know how much it actually costs the entire system when good doctors move elsewhere and cause shortages in certain parts of the country. Not one person can honestly say that they deserve ten million dollars because of a medical mistake. This is especially true when you take into account exactly how difficult a job they have. But lawyers should not only be removed by way of lawsuits against doctors, but they should also be removed by way of lawsuits against insurance companies. Lawyers should not be allowed to tell insurance companies that they are required to cover procedures that are not considered to be proper treatments for certain symptoms and diseases. Insurance companies are being sued today because they will not cover treatments that don’t have proven track records. In other words, they are being sued because they are in the business of health care, not research and development.

The system of lawsuits needs to be replaced with a system of arbitration. An arbitration system could provide for monetary awards when they are called for, but they would be limited to the actual needs of the victim. An arbitration system could also ensure that the decision of the award would be made by people with medical knowledge, not 12 people who got picked for jury duty. I’m sorry John Edwards, no more multi-million dollar settlements based on junk science. An arbitration system could also be used against insurance companies that are not paying for claims, and could in fact do so much quicker than our court system. This system could also track the actions of doctors who are in fact bad doctors and take action to have their medical licenses removed.

Moving to this system keeps more good doctors and medical professionals in the business of health care, which leads me to my second point, which is bringing more good people into the system. The medical profession is currently under-staffed. This causes massive turn-over and forces doctors into 80 hour work weeks. One reason is of course that good doctors are being pushed out by ambulance chasers. And when some intelligent people see this happening all the time, they decide to never get into the profession knowing that it is more profitable to go to law school so they can sue doctors for no good reason. So moving toward a more fair system of dealing with mistakes and bad decisions will keep the good ones in and attract more good ones.

Another idea on this same line is help paying for college loans. This wouldn’t be a free for all, but a system based student performance and professional performance. For doctors and nurses who do well during medical school and during the first few years of their careers, the government would step in to assist them with their loan payments. This would also be determined by their incomes, since it is possible for doctors to make a bit more money, they wouldn’t need the same assistance as say a RN who is also the mother of five children.

The last thing I will touch on is preventative care. Now this is something that the insurance companies could help with, but they aren’t always much more competent than the government. I recently came into contact with a company called MDVIP. I am not endorsing them because I haven’t investigated them, but their ideas make sense. For a fee, they will give you additional access to your doctor, who will use that access to put more emphasis on preventative medicine. So instead of simply treating a symptom, your doctor is looking to make sure you don’t get sick in the first place. From their website, ” Preventing little things from becoming big things helps keep you enjoying life and staying well. MDVIP patients are admitted to the hospital at dramatically lower rates than non-MDVIP patients. Reductions in hospitalizations for MDVIP patients are up to 65% for Medicare beneficiaries and up to a staggering 80% for those with commercial insurance.”

Imagine the cost savings that this would bring to not only your insurance premiums, but also to the Medicare program. Take a look at more stats from their site.

Our healthcare system is reactive, not proactive. We spend our time and money finding and fixing things, not preventing them.

Furthermore, there are many aspects to our healthcare exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, medicine, etc.

Today’s Reactive Healthcare SystemHealthcare Spending $1.5 Trillion

What is being left out of the health care discussion is that most Americans don’t take care of themselves at home, and they don’t get any preventative care from their doctors, who are more interested in seeing as many patients as possible instead of paying attention to the person in front of them at that moment. Your doctor spends an average of 7 minutes in front of you when you go to the office. How many health care dollars are wasted on hospital stays and surgeries that are completely preventable?

Again, these are just a few ideas that I came up with that I know would have a dramatic impact on a failing system. If we don’t find a good way to help, the democrats will end up socializing the system and then life saving decisions will be left in the hands of lawyers. This isn’t working in any country that is trying it and I don’t want to see it attempted here.

Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.