Entrepreneurial Group Proposes ‘Healthcare for You’ Over ‘Medicare for All’ – By Kharen Martinez Murcia (CNS News) / Oct 22 2019
(CNSNews.com) — Healthcare for You, a personalized healthcare alternative to Medicare for All, was introduced on Oct. 17 by the Job Creators Network Foundation (JCNF), a politically nonpartisan group founded by entrepreneurs to help and promote small business.
“What we have learned is that people want to repair, restore, and improve the patient-doctor relationship,” JCNF President Elaine Parker told CNSNews.com in a telephone interview. “We want to get D.C. bureaucrats and politicians out of the healthcare decision-making — they [the JCNF] want to increase choice because it would decrease the cost of everything.”
“Unlike Obamacare, which was a top-down approach, we’ve done the opposite, drawing on the input of more than 25,000 patients, doctors, and healthcare professionals,” said Parker in a statement. If Medicare for All goes through, she added, it will destroy the patient-doctor relationship and eliminate private health insurance for 200 million Americans.”
Healthcare is a top issue for many Americans and is a prominent topic among the Democrats battling to run for president. Many of those candidates – Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren – back some form of Medicare for All. Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar back a public option. On either side, government intervention in the healthcare marketplace dominates.
“The reality with Medicare for All [is that] one side picks all, one choice, government runs healthcare,” Parker told CNSNews.com. “Two hundred million people are going to lose their private health insurance, lose choice, they’re going to lose the doctor that they know and that they want.”
In reference to a single-payer plan, or Medicare for All plan, the JCNF notes on its website the wait time to see a specialist in the United States is less than 20 days. “But in Canada, the wait time is 138 days and in the U.K., the wait time is 154 days.”
Also, when the government runs medicine, everything is rationed. “During 2018-19 in the U.K., nearly 80,000 scheduled medical procedures were canceled the day of for administrative, staffing or other non-clinical reasons,” reported the JCNF.
The JCNF proposal includes various main points, among them is creating price transparency; increasing direct medical care; getting rid of the “middle men” in order to decrease drug prices; eliminating the job lock; and “creating personal health management accounts,” which patients can “pay insurance premiums with pre-tax dollars.”
“The more layers of complexity we can get rid of, the better the care would be for the patients,” Parker said. “It would be patient-centered so that patients can make decisions for their care. But it would ultimately decrease costs, and that is where we are trying to get, so everybody can afford health insurance.”
Another focus of the proposal is how the healthcare system affects the healthcare giver as well. The plan says it will reform the “broken medical malpractice system,” which coerces doctors to order “every conceivable test” before making a decision.
Dr. Scott Barbour is an orthopedic surgeon with more than 20 years of experience who is in support of Healthcare for You. He says the healthcare system as it works now is creating “a barrier between doctors and patients.”
“They try to put this menu together of the way that we are supposed to treat patients,” Barbour told CNSNews.com. “So, what happens is that you tend to turn your brain off and follow this menu, and medicine is just not that kind of practice.”
“In order for doctors to adequately treat their patients there has to be a certain level of trust and understanding,” Barbour said. “Doctors have to be an advocate for their patients, and what we have seen is an increasing penetration of bureaucrats into that decision-making process and we have seen a breakdown of that relationship.”
Parker said the goal is to tell Americans there is a distinct choice between Medicare for All and Healthcare for You. The JCNF hopes that their plan can be translated into congressional legislation.
