1) Insurance must cover any and all pre-existing conditions and they don’t have to be disclosed. I think rates would go way up for everyone to compensate for people joining and then immediately incurring large medical expenses. Also, people could wait until they get really sick (cancer, organ transplant, etc) and then find insurance with the best coverage of their disease.

2) Insurance must cover only pre-existing conditions that are disclosed. For people with expensive conditions, the insurance company could quote sky-high rates making it impossible to afford. Or, as is sometimes the problem today, insurance companies can review past medical history to keep people honest, but then call a current condition pre-existing based on some completely un-related prior diagnosis.

Any ideas on how this would work?

I’m going to address the insurance industry and what role I think the government should play sometime soon and I’ll keep your comments in mind when I do that.

Sorry, my site’s spam filters might be a little over-zealous.

I would say that paying physicians a yearly salary, as the cleveland clinic does, is one thing that could possibly help the problem. I’m not necessarily suggesting that doctor’s make too much money, but any time you get paid on a case by case basis there is an incentive there to perform unnecessary procedures. I think that we’ve all heard of instances where a person was admitted to a hospital, and a doctor who wasn’t there own dropped in for a few seconds then charged several hundred dollars for their time. How to figure out, on a nation-wide scale, what a sufficient salary is is something that would be very difficult to do. Sufficient is a subjective term in this situation too. Is it that a doctor comes out of school without the normal student loans, never has to worry about paying for continuing education and makes around $100,000(depending on location) for the rest of their lives(with inflation adjustments, of course). Or is that number entirely too small. I don’t even necessarily think that it is the solution for all doctor’s…maybe only family practice physicians. Maybe all doctor’s except for certain specialists.

I didn’t read this whole article, but only the part that says that the estimate is 2% of health care cost can be attributed to malpractice type expenses. That is a small piece of the pie, but it’s a huge pie! That 2% was before cost of defensive medicine, which they said would be difficult to track. My idea of malpractice reform isn’t necessarily to limit the amounts paid out to patients of actual malpractice, but to put a common sense/reality check on what is considered malpractice(same checks should be applied to the amounts) Several million dollars can probably be justified for true malpractice when the person who dies or is permanently harmed loses a whole life’s worth of earnings for them and their family. I don’t think that several hundred million is ever justified or deserved. The other part of the costs related to malpractice is defensive medicine. Apparently that number hasn’t/can’t be tracked.

Just 2 weeks ago I saw someone with tri-care(military insurance) have to wait almost an entire week to get their son’s broken finger in a cast, because of the referral process. I have seen govt employees wait a month to get a computer to begin work. Those two things alone are enough to make me think that the govt has no part to play in the insurance industry(especially the instance specifically related to insurance). Maybe the government has a role as a regulator, but they’ve proven not to be so good at that either. Refer to Bernie Madoff.

Another option could be to create a large system like what is provided to federal government employees. They really have it pretty good when it comes to health care. Even with a low deductible plan, the monthly cost is very low. Why can’t that system be replicated on a larger scale for the entire country?

If health care does become affordable and available to all American’s, then what do you do if a seemingly healthy 27 year old doesn’t buy in just to save a little money. If they come up with a life-threatening disease should they be excluded from buying in at that point?

My guess is that everyone in this country wants everyone to be able to get their health care needs met(except a lot of people probably don’t want illegal immigrants to get care), so when the argument is presented the way the reps from Florida and South Carolina did then nobody gets anywhere. I want everyone to get health care and coverage, but not at the expense of everyone else.

This whole argument is being presented in a bad way from both sides. The left uses, “scare tactics"(does the left use those, or was it only George Bush), and the right is essentially doing the same thing. The ultimate truth is that nobody with the power to solve the problem has any idea of how to do it. It, basically, sucks.

What ideas do you have for making everything better?

He said that in the US it’s too easy to sue for anything, because a lot of lawyers tell their clients that if they don’t win, they don’t have to pay anything (the lawyers recupe those costs in the cases they do win). But by requiring a losing plaintiff to pay the court fees, it makes people think twice about suing and helps ensure that people only bring a suit if they really have a case. If a losing plaintiff pays the court fees it also saves on some of the costs that the defending doctors otherwise have to pay.

According to the expert being interviewed, this is the way it is in England (if I remember correctly) and in a number of other European countries. It sound like a good idea to me, so of course Congress won’t do it.

I think everyone will admit something has to change. In general, I’m socially liberal and financially conservative so I’d like the gov’t to stay out of the way most of the time. However, I think it may be necessary for them to get involved in this case. Whether it’s stronger regulation of the industry, or a public option – I don’t know. I do find it troubling that people/companies are able to profit off people being sick, though.

I wish conservatives would offer up a real, comprehensive plan instead of bashing the existing plans or appearing to be in the pockets of big healthcare corporations.