How to fix Obamacare!

The reason we have so many problems in health care is that almost everywhere we look, people face perverse incentives — patients, doctors, employers, employees, etc. When they respond to those incentives they do things that make costs higher, quality lower, and access to care more difficult than otherwise would have been the case.

At the root of those perverse incentives is bad public policy.

Pre-ObamaCare Distortions That Affected Important Choices

– Insurance or Uninsurance? Because we were spending far more on free care for the uninsured than we were spending on subsidies for individually-purchased insurance, millions of people had an incentive to be uninsured.

– Public or Private? Because we spent far more on such public programs as Medicaid and CHIP than we spent on subsidies for individually-purchased insurance, millions of people had an incentive to choose public insurance rather than private insurance.

– Individual or Group? Because employer-provided insurance was generously subsidized through the tax law while individually-purchased insurance received almost no tax relief, the vast majority of people with private insurance had non-portable, employer-provided coverage.

– Third-Party or Self Insurance? Because employer-provided insurance was liberally subsidized through the tax law while people’s ability to get similar subsidies for Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) was greatly restricted, people had too much of the former and too little of the latter. This in turn led to third-party payer domination of the entire medical marketplace and the elimination of real market-determined prices.

– Choices in the Market for Risk Avoidance. Because normal market forces had been so completely repressed, outside the individual market real health insurance simply didn’t exist.

ObamaCare Distortions

So what did the Affordable Care Act do about these problems? It made every one of them worse with perverse incentives!

In Part I of this series, I proposed four simple changes to ObamaCare:

1. Replace all the ObamaCare mandates and subsidies with a universal tax credit that is the same for everyone.
2. Replace all the medical savings accounts with a Roth Health Savings Account.
3. Allow Medicaid to compete with private insurance, with everyone having the right to buy in or get out.
4. Denationalize and deregulate the exchanges and require them to institute change of health status insurance.

The Results. With these four changes we will have started with a health system in which incentives are perverse in every direction and converted it into one in which everyone’s economic incentives are ideal. – See more at: http://healthblog.ncpa.org/can-obamacare-be-fixed-part-ii/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HA#more-36968

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