The "Terzi" Healthcare Plan

The cost of healthcare is staggering. Insurance companies profit tremendously from honest, hard-working Americans, and would rather see a customer die than be forced into dishing out money for a health insurance claim. These companies lobby and push the law until it nears the breaking point, doing everything they can to maximize their profits while treating their customers with blatant disdain. Most politicians don't care to fight this system, because they have lobbyists lining their pockets. How do we fight this? Well, I have a solution.

"The Left" wants us to make the leap into Universal Healthcare. While I do believe that Universal Healthcare is our best bet, I understand that this simply isn't realistic, not yet anyway. We'd be putting the health insurance industry out of business, and "The Right" would do everything in their power to stop it from happening, even referring to it as "socialized medicine" as a cheap scare tactic. The Right's solution to our healthcare woes is to fully privatize healthcare, and "let the business sector handle it." We all know how irresponsible corporations are, and anyone who believes otherwise lacks any degree of experience in dealing with them, even as a customer. And they certainly haven't been paying attention to the news in the past year or so, as this recession was caused by corporate irresponsibility. Lately I've been thinking about both sides of the arguement, and I think I may have come up with a "middle ground" solution. A plan that forces health insurance firms to charge reasonably for their services, by forcing them into being competitive on a realistic level that's fair to customers and small businesses. And here's the best part: We can help out the uninsured with this plan as well!

Please note that at this time, I've yet to conduct any serious research on this matter. Perhaps in the future I'll work out the math, but for now, I'm merely laying out the general concept for you. We already know that healthcare inflation is rising at twice the rate of regular inflation¹. So, for the "Terzi Healthcare Plan" (which I aptly named after myself, of course) we'd begin with a little research. We'd find the average cost of healthcare across all providers, and then adjust that rate for proper, reasonable inflation so that it matches the rest of the economy. We'll then tack on an additional 3% to this amount to create a "cost bar." To make this simpler, we'll put it this way: The "Cost Bar" equals the average cost of healthcare at a normal inflation rate, plus 3%.

Now here's where the plan really gets moving. With this new figure in place, we'd pass a law stating that the health insurance company who is charging the most above the "cost bar" will be penalized. You cannot be punished if your prices match that bar, or are lower. The company (or companies if there is a tie) who charge the most money beyond that bar will be penalized. The penalty? They'll be forced to offer health insurance to the uninsured for 10% of the "cost bar," using a fixed-term contract that lasts for two years. They'd also be required to offer plans to small businesses that earn less than, say, $500,000 per year in gross profits, and that plan would also last for two years.

Of course, charging these companies in penalties is only one small portion of the reforms we'll need. Health Insurance firms should be forced to cover all non-elective healthcare costs, without being allowed to weasel out of claims without good reason. If an insurance company denies a claim, the patient, their family, and/ or their doctor should all have the right to protest the denial to a to-be-formed non-profit third party, with heavy, pricey penalties if that third party rules that the insurance company has abused the rights of the patient or the doctor in denying the claim. That third party would have the right and the power to force the insurer into paying on the claim rightfully. I think the pharmaceutical industry needs similar reforms, but that's a different article entirely!

So, in a nutshell, that is "The Terzi Healthcare Plan." Many of the people who read this might consider my proposal ludicrous, or unfair toward insurance companies. But let me ask this of the people who think this way... have the insurance companies been anything other than unfair to their customers for decades, especially in the past ten to twenty years? Is it not ludicrous that an insurance company can deny coverage for a life-saving treatment, when a person pays an outrageous monthly fee for such a service in the hopes that their insurer will give them such coverage? Insurance companies are irresponsible, unforgiving, abusive, and relentless. I, for one, think that it's time we put that to rest. It's time for insurance companies to take responsibilities for their actions, and it's time to force them into acting responsibly, since they clearly are incapable of doing so on their own.

If you know of a better plan, or if you have opinions as to why my plan may or may not work, please leave a comment and let me know. And if you truly like my plan, then please copy and paste it, or seed it, or just tell a friend about it. Even linking to this article on your blog or on Facebook might help get the message out. I very seriously believe that this plan can save people loads of money, while keeping insurance companies in business, and granting proper healthcare to people. It'll cost money to get this program moving, and health insurance firms won't like the plan whatsoever, but it'll be far cheaper than other plans to fix healthcare, and health insurance companies have been running the system for far too long, and with poor results. Why should we care what they have to say about this plan?
_{1 - http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml}