HEALTH CARE…

  A Dilemma…

“Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome.”  Samuel Johnson

Health care is a particularly difficult issue for the Federal Government to deal with.

• Creating a national health plan and socializing medical care takes the free enterprise system out of the equation and that could create many more problems than it solves.
• Ignoring the issues that make the system less effective than it could and should be is also problematic.

Don’t Mess with Medicare…

First, don’t mess with Medicare.  It’s taken the country four decades to get it working reasonably well so let’s just keep tweaking it to make it better and use the vast knowledge and information it had given us to solve the rest of the problem.

There Is a Solution…

The 33% Solution to this problem is comprehensive and straightforward.

• Allow Medicare to cover the children of America universally until they are 25 years old…
• If a child is covered or is eligible for coverage under a parent’s policy through work, then Medicare only covers what the primary plan doesn’t cover.
• The State Agency would cover parentless children.  A revenue sharing program, perhaps something like Medicaid, would pay for this coverage.
• When parents cannot cover a child because they do not have health insurance, then Medicare would be mandatory and primary for the child but parents would have to contribute to the cost. 
• The parents’ contributions would be three times their tax rate.  If the parents were in the 10% bracket for taxes, they would pay 30% of the Medicare cost.  If they were in the highest tax bracket and paying the entire 33% tax, they would then pay 100% of the Medicare cost.  (Poor Richard believes a similar formula ought to be applied to all Medicare recipients)
• Employers would be required to make health insurance available to all employees.
• Employers would be required to pay a part of the premium for employees and employers would reduce their income tax contribution for those employees in some proportion, e.g., 50%.
• Employees would have to pay a part of the premium based on the same income scale that decides their income tax contribution.  (If you pay 10% in taxes you would pay 10% of the medical premium.)
• Money paid for health care premiums would reduce the employees “earned income”.
• Insurance companies would be required to
• allow all employees to join these plans regardless of medical conditions
• allow the employee to take the same coverage with them as an individual policy if they terminate employment for any reason.
• Terminated employees who qualify for unemployment benefits
• would continue to pay their share of the premium based on the amount of income they receive and the state unemployment system would pay the balance.
• If a person exhausts their unemployment benefits, cannot find work and cannot afford to continue paying for their health insurance, they will be become a temporary Medicare beneficiary and pay some portion of the premium based on their ability to do so.[1]
• The Federal government would reimburse insurance companies for costs they incur on any given patient that exceed a specified amount – say $100,000.00 in a year or $1,000,000.00 in a lifetime.[2]  This allows insurance companies to control their costs, accept everyone regardless of their medical conditions, and still charge affordable premiums.[3]  It also keeps the government out of the free enterprise system for most Americans.
• The 33% Solution could include provision to impose a medical-care tax surcharge in years where expenses are greater than budgeted.