John McCain on Health Care
- Posted by Beth on May 1st, 2008 filed in 2008 election, Barack Obama, Candidates, General, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Politics, Support this health care
I admit I’ve sort of been hiding from the health care debate because anything coming from John McCain would be infinitely better for me (and health care is a big part of my life) than what Hillary and Obama are selling, and I’m also sort of avoiding unpleasantries like worrying about how fast socialized health care will literally kill me.
McCain is saying all the right things with his health care agenda. Here’s his intro to it in the National Review.
What exactly is the problem with the American health-care system?
The problem is not that Americans don’t have fine doctors, medical technology, and treatments. American medicine is the envy of the world. The problem is not that most Americans lack adequate health insurance. The vast majority of Americans have private insurance, and our government spends many billions each year to provide even more.
The biggest problem with the American health-care system is one of cost and access, and as a result tens of millions of individuals have no insurance. For example, we currently spend for about 2.4 trillion dollars a year on health care. A decade from now that number, under current projections, will double to over four trillion dollars.
The Obama and Clinton response to these problems is to promise universal coverage, whatever its cost, and the massive tax increases, mandates, and government regulation that it imposes. But in the end this will accomplish one thing only. We will replace the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of the current system with the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of a government monopoly. We’ll have all the problems, and more, of private health care — rigid rules, long waits, and lack of choices, and risk degrading its great strengths and advantages including the innovation and life-saving technology that make American medicine the most advanced in the world.
I have a different approach. I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health-care system to the patients themselves. To that end, my reforms are built on the pursuit of three goals: paying only for quality medical care, having insurance choices that are diverse and responsive to individual needs, and restoring our sense of personal responsibility.
Read the whole thing here, and then get more details at the Health Care section of his website.
McCain visited the Cleveland Clinic today, and the text of the speech on health care is here.
Be sure to also read what others in the media and punditocracy have had to say about his health care agenda.
Lord Bitememan says:
Personally, I’ve always been a fan of the idea of deregulating treatment for certain easy to treat maladies, and a process for summary dismissal of malpratice cases that lack medical merit by a panel of doctors. There’s no reason why someone can’t diagnose and treat pink eye on an associate’s degree rather than medical school. There’s also no reason why doctors should have to order batteries of medically unnecessary tests just to ward off lawsuits. Both these practices drive up the costs of medicine, increase wait times, waste resources, and drive people away from medicine instead of towards it. I’m especially done with people suing everytime medical treatment fails to produce 100% of the desired results. Doctors are people too, they will make mistakes, their techniques can only do too much, symptoms don’t always reveal the root cause of the problem. Yes, some people will not be able to sue under this system. BFD. It is a greater benefit to society that cheaper, faster, more effective medical treatment will be available to more people than that some angry individual doesn’t get to play the courtroom lottery. I don’t speak without basis either. My mother was misdiagnosed with clinical depression without even an MRI being ordered, and the doctors totally missed the brain tumor that later killed her. Sure we were mad, but mother was also a nurse and well familiar with the frustrations of having to practice defensive medicine. Maybe if they’d ordered that test they could have treated her earlier and saved her. But if we’d sued, how many people wouldn’t be alive today because of the settlement? We owed it to her memory as a medical professional to let the issue go. Unfortunately too few opt for this decision, and our medical system is suffering as a result.
raz0r says:
LB,
A good deal of what we call preventative care could be handled by nurse practitioners and the same for simple maladies such as pink eye.
As for the endless battery of tests, I agree. I had a problem in my leg a few years back (minor nerve damage). The doc informed me that I would need to get an x-ray even though he knew it would show nothing, and he told me so. The insurance company would not sign off an MRI w/o a prior x-ray. All that adds up and not just in medical costs. I missed a few days of work taking care of this. That’s lost productivity on my part.
Insurance companies (not all) and lawyers (the Silky Pony variety) are the problems, not the medical profession.