My column in the Rapid City Journal today features an interview I conducted last week with Republican Rep. Joel Dykstra of Canton who is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Senator Tim Johnson.
Since Dykstra is on the Zaniya Project Health Care Reform Task Force, one of the things I asked him about was about was health care:
Dykstra said he believes in order to repair our system, the patient must become the customer of the hospital. Right now, government and insurance companies are usually the customer.
"We have to find ways to unleash the force of free enterprise," Dykstra continued. "We have to open up competition to empower consumers to make decisions about their own health care. People have to become real consumers, so they’re making decisions about whether or not to spend that dollar."
Read the full column here.
I had more material from the interview than I had room to include, so I may include some of that here at a later date.
Yesterday I interviewed Sam Kephart, businessman from Spearfish, who is also a Republican, and plan to share some of that in next week's column. Though Kephart is more "moderate" than I on social issues, I found him to be a very likable, positive man with a lot of optimism for our country and life in general. He seems to genuinely want to bridge some of the divide between conservatives and liberals.
2 comments:
Bob, what are your and/or Dykstra's ideas for reforming health care in the U.S.? How do we get people to be the hospital customers instead of government and insurance companies? I'm assuming that you favor abolishing the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid. If so, how would you ensure that our veterans get the health care they deserve and that those who are unable to earn a living can still receive necessary health care?
I don't claim to know the answer for fixing the current healthcare mess; after all, it's been decades in getting to where it is. But like someone who's received the suggestion that he blow his head off to cure his headache, I know what the answer ISN'T.
I'm not speaking for Dykstra, but for myself I'd say anything that moves us away from government intervention in the health care industry is generally in the right direction.
Programs like Medicare and Medicaid are a part of the problem, inflating overall health care costs and farther removing more patients as the "customers" of the health care provider.
Moving away from "covers everything" plans would be another step in the right direction; the more "free" or very low-cost options you have, the more those are going to be used, which will make their availability more scarce, which will probably make them more expensive to the insurer, which will come back around and result in higher premiums. And all this can have the effect of an indirect "rationing" if there simply isn't enough access to whatever care this may be ( e.g.
emergency room waits).
There are also health care cooperatives out there (I've encountered at least two Christian groups) where people pay their routine expenses, but for major expenses, people within the cooperative help each other. This is another way to help keep overall costs down and minimize overuse of the health care system.
There are those, such as Herman Cain and President Bush, who believe changes in the tax code can help with portability and more free market exercise of the system.
There are no solutions that amount to waving a wand and creating the utopia socialists long for. There will always be those people in need, there will always be those who have difficulty affording everything they need, and there will always be those who are wiped out by a catastrophic illness. Only socialists believe we can "evolve" beyond this, and we found out how realistic their expectations are when the Soviet Union came crashing down.
But private charity and philanthropy can help those who hit hard times through no fault of their own, and we need to move farther away from government wealth-redistribution so that we can get back to this private system we had in America prior to the New Deal.
And we need to move farther away from government involvement to lower individual costs and the overall cost to the health care system. The free market system will, for the most part, regulate itself. But when you get government involved, you incur additional bureaucratic and regulatory costs, and you throw off the factors that regulate costs and keep them somewhat reasonable.
Again, I don't have any magic answers, but I definitely know what the answer is NOT: more government.
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