The Wall Street Journal reports:
Mr. Giuliani, currently leading opinion polls for the 2008 Republican nomination, wants to move tens of millions of people from employer-based health insurance to the individual market as a way of giving people more coverage choices. It is an idea he alluded to in Tuesday’s Republican debate in Manchester, N.H., and later expanded on in an interview.
[...]
In Mr. Giuliani’s view, the U.S. health-care system’s major problem is a lack of consumer choice. “It’s your health; you should own your own insurance,” he said in Tuesday’s debate. “The reality is that we need a free market.”
He envisions a system where neither state regulations nor federal tax law push people into expensive plans rich in benefits. Rather, health insurance should be more like car insurance, he said, where people pay out of pocket for minor repairs and maintenance.
The employer-based system is clearly not as efficient nor as equitable as we would like. I think that this plan is certainly a step in the right direction — although I will withhold my ultimate judgment for when I have the full details. Having individuals pay for certain services through deductibles will increase their price elasticity of demand and thus lead to a reduction in health care spending. We need to give individuals an incentive to obtain pricing information and make decisions based on these prices rather than simply accepting any procedure that they are insulated from paying.
UPDATE: While we are on the topic of health care reform, I thought I should pass this along:
POOR NHS treatment has led to almost half a million Scots dying in the last 30 years, a new study has revealed.
Doctors at Glasgow University found that between 1974 and 2003, a total of 462,000 people died in Scotland as a result of health service failings
It means Scotland has one of the highest avoidable death rates in western Europe.
The study examined the number of deaths caused by a lack of “timely and effective health care”.
The vast majority of people – around 250,000 – who died due to inadequate or delayed treatment were heart or stroke patients.
For more on nationalization and the single-payer myth, see this recent essay.
Pingback: Health Care BS » Blog Archive » Giuliani Advocates Free-Market Health Care Reform
The fact is that everyone is looking at the evolution of a system where NO ONE has a comprehensive view.. Its not as simple a public good as laying out water pipes and its not as simple a good as a shrink wrapped product markets are good at providing.. It has some unique characteristics that make it akin to running governance of science as distinct from managing technologies.. While the governments can hardly manage technologies, private enterprise can hardly govern science. Similarly, the evolution of healthcare has given us mixed results, much like the market.. leaving every sixth American uninsured.. Do we need the One/Sixth solution? A debate on healthcare cannot be led by its stakeholders.. the payers, the prviders, the physician, the pharma company, the pharmacy or the patient.. It has to begin above all of them.. It requires a very different framework.. All that we have achieved in the past 100 years is tinkering as a mechanism to address the perceived crisis and access, quality and cost being compromised as an outcome giving a perceived solution.. This battle has to come down to ground realities rather than simply being fought at perceptionosphere.. ..
Satish Jha, Chairman, eHealthcare Foundation..