Just because Vice President Harris & Company prefers making the current one-size-fits-all system even bigger doesn’t mean that it’s the most sensible approach to solving our current problems.
The mainstream media has given President Trump and Sen. JD Vance a lot of flak for the healthcare reform plan Vance recently unveiled. This flak has come for no good reason.
At the September 10 debate, President Trump
stated that he had “concepts” of a plan to fix Obamacare. Then, at a late September campaign event, Sen. Vance
discussed what exactly their plan would entail.
“We want to make sure everybody is covered,” he said. “But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a ‘one size fits all’ approach.”
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of Trump-Vance’s new healthcare proposal, let’s start with a more basic, fundamental question — Is it really fair to lambast this Republican ticket for merely stating that they want to move on from a “one size fits all” system?
Because that’s what many of their progressive critics are currently doing. They are trashing Trump-Vance’s new healthcare plan before even reviewing it because they believe that transitioning the nation away from a one-size-fits-all system is a nonstarter.
But is the data behind Vice President Harris’ plan — making the current one-size-fits-all system even bigger — really compelling enough to shut down all debate?
It's not as if the current system is working well. After all, the Heritage Foundation has found that Obamacare has alarmingly
doubled the cost of individual health insurance.
So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that Harris’ “double down” approach is expected to make the nation’s healthcare problems worse, not better.
For example, Harris wants to
ban private insurance and
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAAjt_JaymI">replace it with a government-run provider even though places like Canada and the United Kingdom have watched their healthcare prices and wait times increase tremendously after implementing similar programs.
To the
dismay of Trump’s campaign chief, she and her allies even want to
replace the private companies that negotiate against Big Pharma for cheaper drug costs with a government-controlled arbiter. They want to do this even though the government has a
terrible track record of setting drug prices and the private companies (called pharmacy benefit managers) that currently perform the job have saved programs like Medicare Part D a full 20% of their annual costs.
The moral of the story — just because Vice President Harris & Company
prefers making the current one-size-fits-all system even bigger doesn’t mean that it’s the
most sensible approach to solving our current problems. And it certainly doesn’t mean that those who disagree with doubling down on the current one-size-fits-all health care status quo are “cold-hearted” or “selfish,” like some are saying of Trump and Vance.
Rather than build upon the foundations of a healthcare system that has already proven to be suboptimal, Trump-Vance want to fix it with a concept called “risk-pools.”
Under Obamacare, all patients — healthy and sick — are thrown into the same health insurance plans. The problem is that bunching them all together drives up costs on the average, which means higher insurance rates for those with fewer healthcare ailments.
Under risk pools, sicker Americans would instead be taken care of under separate, “high-risk” plans — plans that are more equipped to handle their individual conditions.
Separating these Americans should make intuitive sense — everyone knows that customization and specialization bolster quality. However, Vice President Harris’ media surrogates are hung up on a belief that “segregating” Americans based on their health conditions would — although lowering costs for healthy people — just lead to skyrocketing premiums and deductibles for the least well-to-do.
This isn’t true. Risk pool systems, which, unlike Obamacare, are built upon increasing marketplace choice and competition,
lower costs; they don’t increase them. And history proves it.
High-risk pools typically receive the backing of generous government subsidies to keep them affordable for all. Yet, even with these subsidies, healthcare costs are far less than what they would be under one-size-fits-all alternatives because of the innovation that each of the individualized plans in the marketplace brings to the table.
High-risk pools aren’t a novel concept. Before Obamacare, 35 states used them, and they worked exceptionally well.
Take Minnesota’s, for example, which
offered nonsmokers $5,000 deductibles for $130 monthly premiums — virtually the same price when compared to those offered in the conventional market. Then Obamacare came along and made everything less affordable, leading many insurers to pull out of the state’s healthcare system.
All Trump and Vance seek to do is correct the one-size-fits-all mistakes of the past by bringing this sensible “risk pool” solution to the federal level. That should be music to the ears of everyone whose ideological blinders don’t have them committed to upholding and amplifying the broken current status quo.
Chuck Muth is president of Citizen Outreach.
