[WARNING: Portions of this first paragraph are tongue in cheek. The rest of this post I'd like you to take seriously.] On July 22, 2009 Senator Orrin Hatch sent me an email asking me to share with him my ideas on healthcare. Fortunately for him, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time so I decided to give him a well thought out answer. I didn’t even care if he took credit for my ideas as long as they were implemented. I began paying close attention to all of his interviews looking for even a hint that he had decided to include my advice. Nothing! When it became apparent he had no interest in finding real solutions and identifying the real problems to health care reform, I decided to take credit for my ideas and post them on my blog. Here’s what I sent to him:

Dear Senator Hatch;

The healthcare solution lies in two primary facets. Reduction in costs and enhancement of opportunities

REDUCTION IN COSTS

• Litigation has crippled an already gravely ill healthcare system. Although the bill is sent directly to the doctor, the cost of a his/her liability insurance is not paid for by the doctors — it’s paid for by each and every one of us–the patients, through our healthcare costs. It doesn’t matter whether you are on a pay as you go plan, or are making monthly premium payments, your healthcare costs are higher because doctors have a high litigation insurance bill to pay. We can stop this by limiting damages awards and forcing the loser of the lawsuit to pay for the costs of the litigation. Fewer people will take the risk of suing a doctor or medical facility if they have more to lose than they do to gain.
• Medical equipment sales are brisk because every facility feels like they each have to have the latest and greatest diagnosis and treatment equipment in order to compete on the open market. Consequently, primary and secondary care facilities have duplicates of the same equipment as other facilities, and since they all purchase that equipment on credit, you and I end up paying higher healthcare costs as a result. I wish I could say I have a the solution to this particular problem because it is one of the factors that needs to be addressed as we attempt to lower healthcare costs. But unfortunately I have not come up with one (yet).
• Illegal immigration has created a problem in this great nation that is crippling our economy on many fronts, and it has been difficult to get our elected officials to recognize this or care enough to do something about it. Chris Cannon lost his job in large part because he did not properly represent his constituents in this area. Illegal immigration increases our healthcare costs. Illegal aliens know and understand that no one can be turned away from a hospital emergency room no matter what their financial circumstances are or their lack of ability to pay. Consequently, it is the emergency rooms where the illegal aliens go to receive their healthcare. As a direct result of this government mandated policy, many medical facilities in the border states have had to close their doors and go out of business as a result. Bankruptcy became their only option. Those medical facilities that have managed to stay open do so by increasing the healthcare costs for the rest of us.
• Arrogance and waste by the medical staff are another factor that contributes to high costs in healthcare. Nearly every hospital staff is trained to open a package of bandages, bandage you with one of them, but they charge you for the full contents of the box, even though next time you need a bandage, they open a new package and use just one. They do this with every product and service they provide you. I have been self-insured most of my adult life. I paid cash for my first three children’s births. When my wife had to have an emergency appendectomy, I paid cash for that as well. When my son was admitted into the hospital for a ruptured appendix, I again paid cash. As a result, I have always had a vested interest in protecting my healthcare dollar. That’s when I discovered this particularly nefarious hospital policy. Because the bill is [usually] submitted directly to the insurance company and the insurance company pays in full, no one ever questions this policy or their bill. However, in the cases of my wife’s and son’s hospitalizations, I never left their sides the entire time and I kept a tally of every single item they used in their treatment (including medication) as well as the amount of time spent in their care by the nursing staff and doctors. Each time I received the bill, the overbilling was fraudulent. I talked the hospital and doctors down to a reasonably sized bill. This kind of activity goes on daily in the majority of hospitals across the country. We have to put a stop to this fraudulent activity in order to bring our costs back down. Which also brings me to my next bullet point…
• The current insurance system increases costs rather than decreases them. Doctors charge the insurance company the maximum amount allowable for each treatment (or even for a basic doctor visit for a wellness care visit), and the insurance passes those costs on the the consumer (businesses or individuals–whomever pays the premium), no questions asked. Well we need to get into the habit of asking more questions. In fact, doctors should automatically lower their cost of an office visit for anyone who does not go through an insurance company and instead pays them on the spot by cash or check (0r PayPal).
• And let’s not forget the problems that big government brings to the party in increasing the already high cost of healthcare. Egregiously high taxation by our government is another large cost added to our final bill (and there are people who actually think government running our healthcare is a good thing–why???). When a doctor or a medical facility pays 35% to 50% of their income to the Federal Government, the doctor isn’t going to lower their personal standard of living, instead they pass the those taxes directly on to us–the consumer. So we can’t really blame this part of the high cost of medical care on the doctors or hospitals. The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of a government that seeks to expand it’s size and take away our freedoms and liberties. We know from reading the US Constitution that smaller government and less taxation is better for our freedoms and liberties and better for our economy (and if only you and your fellow legislators would read it and actually follow it once in a while, we’d all be better off).
• Another aspect of our high healthcare costs is the high administration costs both hospitals and doctors incur in the course of administering the various insurance plans, and government mandated taxes. There’s a plethora of other administrative third party mandated tasks added on which also increase our healthcare cost. While these combined administrative costs may not be the single largest contributor, they certainly don’t do anything to solve the problem.
• It is my personal opinion based on years of my personal experiences, that both the pharmaceutical firms and the insurance companies are the bane of the healthcare industry’s existence (from a consumer’s perspective anyways). I suspect that the lobbyists from the Pharm industry are likely some of your larger campaign contributors (I haven’t checked OpenSecrets.org lately so I don’t know for sure), so you probably have less incentive to address this part of the problem than we all would hope. Having worked in the Medical Services Department of a pharmaceutical firm, I happen to know that drug companies work as follows: They find a natural healing compound (herb, bark, blossom, etc.) that grows naturally somewhere in the world and then they turn their scientists loose to synthesize the compound so they can put a 7 year patent on it and make huge dollar amounts by charging us an arm and a leg (while foreign countries get changed much less for those same drugs). In many cases, prescription costs here in the US can take the bulk of many seniors monthly checks. The problem with these synthesized compounds produced by the pharmaceutical companies is that they are not naturally metabolized by our bodies and cause harm to our kidneys and liver and eventually cause renal failure in a significant statistical segment of those who ingest those “legal” drugs. What the pharm companies and the FDA won’t tell you is that there are natural remedies that do a better job in the healing process without causing damage (in fact they are doing their best to try to regulate natural compounds so they can sew up the market and prevent consumers from using any health remedy without their approval and taking a piece of the financial pie). As a direct result of this deception, more people are introduced into the healthcare system (more money for Doctors and the pharmeceutical industry) so they can sell more medication and end up putting patients on dialysis to help them live longer (and they can make even more money). What a racket!
• The FDA is supposed to oversee and protect us from unscrupulous food manufacturers. In fact, it is the FDA that needs supervision. And because proper oversight of the  FDA is lacking, our lack of proper nutrition in our produced foods is a major contributor to the poor health and medical issues most people suffer in this nation. The FDA allows the nutrients, enzymes and phytochemicals to be taken out of our foods (because they process the foods at high temperatures) and then sold to us in grocery stores supposedly having sufficient nutrition to keep us healthy (at least that’s what the labels tell us). Just like scurvy, cancer is a disease that can be prevented by proper nutrition. The food pyramid is a crock and they know it. The FDA does not protect the health of the American citizen. It protects the profits of the various industries they oversee. Overhauling this agency is the first step to returning the population of this nation back to a state of health that will automatically reduce their healthcare costs and in many ways fix the healthcare problem in American (although making it somewhat less profitable for those engaged in undermining our health).

ENHANCEMENT OF OPPORTUNITIES

• First let’s make one thing perfectly clear. In my personal opinion, having quality health care is not a right or a privilege. It’s nice to have available to us, but it is no more a right than being wealthy is a right. Both are dictated by our circumstances. That being said, here are a couple of things that I believe will provide a better chance for Americans (who are willing to be contributors to society rather than a drain) to have proper and affordable health care.
• Encourage the tax-free creation of accounts (not insurance) which individuals can contribute to and draw from for regular medical visits, and then require that doctors give significant discounts when visits are paid for out of these accounts. Then allow the proceeds the doctor receives from those accounts to be tax-free income. I promise that you will see a significant reduction of costs while at the same time a significant increase in American citizen’s ability to receive medical care. Allow for businesses, churches, and charities (no government entities) to create accounts for their employees and members. Insurance is just a middle man that can be eliminated from the equation altogether. You’ve heard the adage: “Want to save money? Eliminate the middle man.” If people still choose to have insurance, they retain that freedom in this free market solution.
• Grant individuals the right to seek out health care (using the aforementioned accounts) from ANY SOURCE they desire whether it be a shaman, medical doctor, holistic health practitioner, masseuse, or chiropractor. You’ll be surprised how well an unregulated free market system fixes the ills that the government created when they (the government) got involved in the business of licensing who could and could not practice medicine. And because it opens up the market, it creates healthy competition, which in turn lowers healthcare costs, and isn’t that the real problem we’re trying to solve in the first place?

These are my proposals. Please don’t let Bennett’s “Socialist Healthcare Lite” pass upon the failure of the current bill in the Senate. Come up with something sane that incorporates the ideas I’m proposing to you here. Or just drop it all together, and let the free market fix the problem.

Sincerely,

Monte Bateman