Summary

America spends a larger percentage of its GDP on healthcare than any other country. And our healthcare outcomes are not that good. There are solutions, but the politicians have refused to address the issues. It’s time to change that.

Recommendations

Medicare

Leave the program as is.

Medicaid

Replace the current Medicaid and Obamacare systems with a single program that provides income-based subsidies to buy health insurance in the competitive market.

Remove Obamacare’s “essential service” requirements which drives up insurance costs.

Focus on providing insurance for catastrophic care. Incidental healthcare expenditures should be paid out-of-pocket using Medisave.

Medisave

Transform the woefully inadequate Health Savings Account system into a system that enables lifelong, tax free savings for healthcare costs.

Allow businesses to take tax deductions for matching employee contributions to their health savings accounts.

Medisave accounts should be willable to a person’s heirs.

Transparency

Require doctors, clinics, and hospitals to publish on the Internet the costs of the procedures they offer.

Market

Allow healthcare insurance companies to sell health insurance across state lines, just like life insurance, car insurance, and home insurance companies.

Background

America spends 17.4% of our GDP on healthcare while the OECD average is 9.2%. And our health outcomes are not good. I have spent a lot of time in Singapore as part of my business travels. Singapore has one of the best and most cost-effective healthcare systems in the world. Singapore only spends 6% of GDP on healthcare, yet they have a lower infant mortality rate and higher life expectancy than Americans. They’ve been able to do this by turning their country into a nation of healthcare shoppers who pay attention to the costs and outcomes of their healthcare providers. It should be noted that many of Singapore’s healthcare policies originated in American universities and think tanks. I don’t think it’s possible to replicate Singapore’s numbers in America given our aging population and unhealthy lifestyles. But we can make significant improvements to the quality of care and overall cost of the system by adopting many of their policies.