Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared yesterday there would be no vote on a health care bill until at the earliest September.
As there is time now to try and get the health care bill done correctly the following are a series of questions we need to make sure legislators are able to answer:
If a public insurance option is enacted will it lead to lower cost and higher quality? In other words are we going to change the payment process to encourage providers to deliver care of higher value to patients?
Who is actually going to pay for this new trillion dollar entitlement? How much will they pay?
How will the new plan tackle the real problem in American Health Care which is the massive waste that exists in the delivery of care?
If states are already well along the path of having insurance coverage for all will federal policy allow their good work to continue or will this new plan derail everything that has already been accomplished?
Does the new plan require doctors and hospitals to report their clinical performance publicly?
These are just a few of the many questions that need to answered in the ensuing debate. It is important to realize that the true cost of health care is not in the insurance administration.That only makes up 7% of the health care bill. More than 80% of the cost is in the delivery of care. We have claimed at least 40% of the delivery of that care is waste.If we could remove that it would be a trillion dollars,which would pay for covering everyone.
A number of states are already fixing the uninsured problem. In fact, in Wisconsin 98% of residents have access to health insurance and Governor Doyle is not done yet.We will have 100% access with what is being proposed in this state. In addition we have very robust quality reporting mechanisms through the Wisconsin Collaborative for Health Care Quality and the Wisconsin Hospital Association Checkpoint.We don't need a new federal program to comply with. The new legislation should allow states that have already tackled and solved these problems to continue with their own plans as long as they meet the goals established by the federal program.
There is much left to do on these existing bills but let's start by getting detailed answers to the above questions.
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