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How I would reform health care:
1. Make third-party payments for routine, non-catastrophic medical treatment illegal. Watch prices come down when (a) people pay for their treatment with their own money and (b) the reimbuarsement paperwork for every routine medical visit is eliminated. This also gets the middleman (whether it's an insurance company or a govt agency) out from between patients and doctors.
2. Enable pretax financing of medical expenses in segregated accounts. (For poor people this stuff would get financed through Medicaid or food-stamp-like vouchers). These accounts would pay for doctor visits and medicines, and also will be used to pay for.........
3. Catastrophic coverage, i.e. real insurance -- if you have an unforeseen medical disaster like a car accident, heart attack, stroke, broken bones, you have insurance to cover it. Just like if your house burns down or your car gets totalled.
This setup will, at minimal cost, give us universal coverage and maximum freedom. No big govt bureaucracy and no grasping insurance companies other than for catastrophic. People can choose how much medical care they want, and the minimum annual checkup and other stuff would be financed out of the special account.
I'm sure there are details that this doesn't pick up but it's a pretty good template as a starting point. Yes, there will be transitional issues to be managed; that can be done.
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