My answer to Hillary

Hillary Clinton posted this question at Yahoo Answers today: “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”

Here’s what I posted there:

Fixing the current mess requires multiple approaches, most of which need to be done simultaneously and all of which will hurt the profits of various special interests.

1) Government covers all tuition for health profession students willing to work after graduation at public clinics and hospitals at a flat salary for ten years.

2) Medical schools are required to admit all qualified students and fill every slot.

3) Credentialed health professionals from other nations in the industrialized world are fast-tracked to licences in the USA.

All of the above will dramatically increase the number of doctors, dentists, chiropractors, etc. available to treat patients without reducing quality of treatment. This will lower costs by increasing competition. No one has a *right* to an expensive house and luxury car just because they are a doctor.

4) Create universal coverage by expanding Medicare to all residents of the USA. Money saved by not fussing over citizenship and providing a healthier workforce and healthier children, in conjunction with the other steps, will cover the expense.

5) Price controls. If Canada and other Western nations can put doctors on salaries, make hospitals charge only their real expenses plus a few percent profit, and drug companies the same, than so can we. None of them will like this.

6) Take the insurance industry out of the picture completely. Insurance is always a gamble. Why should people have to gamble with their healthcare? There is no constitutional “right” to sell medical insurance.

7) Tax all individuals and corporations a small percentage of their gross incomes rather than making some of them pay huge percentages to cover only their personal expenses or their workers. No exceptions, no loopholes for multibillion-dollar corporations or individuals.

8) Revoke all the tax “reforms” of the last 12 years for people or corporations bringing in more than $250,000 year gross income.

Some combination of the above steps, perhaps with others, could finally give Americans healthcare as good as people in a dozen other countries get.

This whole process will be doomed to failure unless there is simultaneously complete electoral reform to destroy the power of wealthy individuals and industries to control election and re-election to office. That’s another topic.