5 steps toward a fresh approach to health care reform

This article was first featured on Fox News on February 21st, 2024.

As the cost of living continues to be a crucial concern for voters, there’s an urgent need for candidates to present viable solutions for making health care both affordable and accessible. Here are five fresh principles for health care reform that can resonate across party lines.

Address root causes, not just symptoms. One of the biggest reasons major Washington-led health care reforms have failed to lower health care costs is because they focus on health insurance instead of health care, and very little on health itself.

ObamaCare and the Inflation Reduction Act are perfect examples. Every year, these programs give more money to health insurance companies to offset the costs of higher premiums for people with larger incomes. A better approach is to fund American patients, not health insurance companies, by giving them direct control over the subsidy they qualify for and let them use it to buy the care and coverage that works best for them.

To further stop this doom loop, lawmakers must shift their focus from merely subsidizing insurance premiums to addressing the underlying issues of high health care prices and excessive demand. Lower prices and lower demand will lead to lower premiums.

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Localize health care. The challenge for Washington in focusing on health and health care is that they are both local issues, not national. Health care is delivered in a local setting, and the quality of care you receive is largely linked to what is available locally. Meanwhile, population health is much more influenced by local conditions than national ones.

This means a command-and-control approach from Washington to improve the health of our people and the quality of care they receive is doomed to fail. Instead, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should leverage its position to be a facilitator of change at the local level rather than an imposer of change.

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