Regarding “Health care free market abject failure” column published May 25 in The Signal:
The financial burden faced by the Lunetta family stemming from an inept health-care system is similarly faced by many Americans. For those online, the “comment” dialogue has been active and important as our country debates this issue.
As a frontline physician, my job is to define the problem (make a diagnosis) and then develop a solution (treatment plan). My decisions though are predicated on evidence-based research helping to guide my patients, and not skewed by outside special-interest forces like in government.
The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and Medicare Part D were both written by self-serving lobbyists, then rubber-stamped by congressional representatives to extract huge profits from the American people.
As we try to re-align health care into a worthy system, here are some of my solutions:
1) Make it legal for Americans to fill their prescriptions outside the country, where the rest of the world is paying one-tenth the costs;
2) Look at health-care systems around the world and extract and contour those ideas so we can apply them to a new system;
3) For whatever system created, start it on a local level using one or two states to iron out logistic problems instead of making the whole nation guinea pigs;
4) Make the VA system the premier health care in the country;
5) Institute medical tort reform and augment physician/hospital oversight and peer review;
6) For whatever law is made for health care, force all members of Congress to live under those same laws.
Maybe then, families like the Lunettas can heal and not face a similar financial burden.
