Pennsylvania health insurance reform is coming. But if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has her way, you can expect to see your Pennsylvania individual and family health insurance rates rise faster than you ever imagined. However, there are some alternative solutions that will cost less, expand coverage and improve health care quality.
Five health care reform ideas that should be implemented (courtesy of Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Paul Howard) are:
1. Eliminate the tax exclusion for health care and replace it with a tax deduction or tax credit. Typical savings could be used to reduce the cost of individual and family health insurance policies.
2. Increase and expand funding to high-risk plans so that major pre-existing conditions would be better covered.
3. Let health insurance companies sell insurance across state lines. If Pennsylvania consumers do not want or need expensive “Cadillac” health plans with features they will never use, why force them to buy these plans? Maybe they could get cheaper plans elsewhere.
4. Eliminate waste, abuse and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Fraudulent activities cheat taxpayers out of billions of dollars each and every year, including many in Pennsylvania. Let’s take on this problem before revamping the entire health care system.
5. Enact tort reform that will end lawsuit abuse. This change would reduce the federal budget deficits by approximately $54 billion over the next 10 years. And that’s better than the ideas we have been hearing from Washington DC.
As the owner and founder of Pahealthinsurancecoverage.com, Pennsylvania’s leading resource for affordable health care, I sincerely support health care reform. But let’s do it the right way. Let’s not offer free insurance to a few and charge everyone else a fortune. Let’s also not bankrupt America in the process of enacting this law.
You may view the Holtz-Eakin/Howard article here. If you would like to instantly compare Pennsylvania health care, please click on the “Get Instant Quote” button at the top of the page.