Bob Robey Health Care Reform - Thinking outside of the box - What About Medicare Hospitals?

Fixing Health Care Sending someone to Washington means sending someone that can think outside of the box. We need fresh ideas and not just rehashing the same set of ideas that have not worked in the past. Health care is one of the areas that we need to think about different ways to fix it. We need to try different programs in micro environments to find out which programs work and which ones don't.

It Is Not About Who Provides The Insurance

The health insurance problems are not who is providing the insurance it is about the cost of the insurance. The problems that need to be addressed are fraud, waste, abuse, and a huge bureaucracy. All of these categories contribute to the largest problem, cost. Nothing that the congress is proposing will prevent a hospital from charging you $60.00 for an aspirin.

Government Control Of Health Care Will Increase The Cost

The cost of health insurance began to rise when the Medicare and Medicaid programs began as part of the "Great Society" started by Lyndon Johnson. The government has tried to lower health care costs by reducing the amount that they reimburse doctors that take Medicare and Medicaid patients. The lowering of the fees paid to doctors resulted in the doctors making up the difference by charging everyone else more for medical services to make up the shortfalls in Medicare and Medicaid fees. This fee inflation combined with an ever increasing bureaucracy to process health insurance claims, has nearly tripled the cost of health insurance in the last 5 years.

One Fix Will Not Fix All

The demographics for health care needs is different by location, medical needs, medical services availability, and populations. One fix for health care needs is not going to meet the varying needs of the health care demographics.

Some areas will have larger Medicare populations, some areas more children, some areas will cater to adults that don't have a lot of time to go to the doctors because of their busy schedules, some areas will have more patients from industrial environments, and some areas will have a healthy mix of patients. No two areas will have the same medical needs. We need to provide a variety of flexible health care options.

What About Some Medicare Hospitals?

The Veterans Administration has a pretty good system of hospitals around the country serving a class of patients, our veterans. If we created a system of Medicare hospitals that were dedicated to Medicare patients and located them in densely populated retirement states, such as Florida and Arizona, we may be able to reduce Medicare expenses.

Prescription drugs from the VA hospital are given to veterans at significantly reduced costs because the VA hospitals use their buying power to obtain drugs at reduced costs. We could use the same leverage at the Medicare hospital system.

Medicare hospitals will eliminate significant amounts of paperwork because doctors will be employees of the government and there will be no Medicare or Medicaid claim forms that will need to be processed. A significant savings in overhead.

The buying power of these hospitals will reduce the cost of all products from bed pans to cat scan machines and prescription drugs.

Getting Rid Of Medicare and Medicaid Fraud

Medicare fraud is estimated at between $14 and 30 Billion dollars a year. Let's start health care reform by eliminating that waste and fraud.

This is just one idea, and it won't work everywhere but if we think outside of the box and start brainstorming ideas we can fix health care without the government controlling it.

TEXT and PHOTO CREDIT: Bob Robey for Congress Email: info@bobrobeyforcongress.com 5703 Red Bug Lake Rd #309 Winter Springs, FL 32708-4969