Friday, August 24, 2007

Romney looks to states to expand health care coverage - CNN.com

This is what I really would like to see.  A reasonable effort to find a compromise about universal health care.  However, you're going to see efforts by Clinton, Obama, and Edwards in them trying to push for a more expensive way to get people on board for health insurance.

Now I've got an idea, but there may be some downsides to it.  I haven't thought it through or debated about it or even ran the numbers, but it came to me just now.  So here we go:

A private, government healthcare system.  However, there's a twist.  You're not going to get a doctor with tons of training and schooling to come work at a government run hospital, so offer them this deal.  The government will cover all costs of your medical education in return for a term of service at a government run hospital for X amount of years.  Say 5 or 10.  I'd lean more towards 10 because educating a doctor is quite expensive.

So, if you want to be a doctor, you can be for free (or significantly reduced costs since I haven't run the numbers) and you work for the government for a few years, then you can move on to being a regular, private practice or different hospital.  You pay the doctors a bit less then they would normally get (say 1/2 pay) because the government took care of the education bills and everyone wins.

Poor medical students get a good, free, or cheap education, therefore putting America back in the saddle in terms of science and medicine.  American citizens can come to these hospitals at a significantly reduced cost because you're not paying for high doctor's salaries.  You could even put a medical malpractice cap on lawsuits to keep costs down.  Say $5 million cap.

That will keep malpractice insurance costs down.  Couple that with other cost saving measures, I think some kind of mutant part of that plan might work.

Now, like I said, I haven't thought it all the way through or even ran numbers (I don't know where to begin on the numbers), so if any of you have a counter argument for it, please feel free to speak up.

 

Travis

travis@rightwinglunatic.com

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