Daily News Updates - Health Insurance News

McCain vs Obama: Common Ground, Pt.1 – Reducing medical cost; Mr. McCain’s objective.

With the stark differences highlighting the contrasts between the two opposing candidates on health insurance/care reform, it’s interesting to note some of the common causes. The good people at Reuters have posted a very good article in the Factbox section on their www.reuters.com/article site, which illuminates some key areas where the two warring camps do agree. Two of these areas noted by the Reuters team are: spending “ too much on drugs and doctors” and “on what changes to make.” How our nation’s health insurance/care reform should implement these changes, however, is where the deep divide begins. Taking a closer look at the two different health insurance/care reform proposals will allow us to see the commonality, apart from the differences.

As far as controlling how much is spent on ‘drugs and doctors’, one estimate asserts that as much as 30% to 40 % of medical spending is unnecessary, wasteful, even dangerous. The take is that incentives to provide unnecessary care need to be removed. So let’s consider Mr. McCain’s position first. It appears that simplified formula is to:

 1) Move everyone over to a new health insurance bargain basement consumer-driven market of private health insurance.

2) Cut the benefits to bare bones so that medical treatment above the minimum is too expensive for most Americans.

3) Then those Americans will forego extra treatment that they don’t really need.

The savings to health insurance providers could be phenomenal. The next half of the equation is how to implement these changes.

Continued…