Over the past month, I have been repeatedly shouting from the rooftops here that government run health care will be a disaster and that the free market can do better.  Here is an article that presents something of what free market health care looks like.

Michigan-based family doctor Dr. John Blanchard has been practicing the retainer-based care for eight years. He said his patients have “unfettered” access to him whenever they need him for a fee of between $50 to $150 a month.

The model has enabled Blanchard to “cut down on everything by about 25%,” including his patient caseloads and time spent on filing insurance claims.

One industry report cited that processing claims is the second-biggest area of wasteful expenditure in the health care system, costing as much as $210 billion annually.

$50 – $150 a month is not bank-breaking.  Most “poor” people spend that much on their cable TV  (I’ve seen it).  I myself have health insurance with a high deductible in case I get hit by a bus.  I go to a doctor that doesn’t process health insurance, and my medical bills are not bankrupting me.

The President seems to be trying to frame the debate as “we must have government run health care because the only other options are unthinkable”.  And that simply isn’t so.

If we cut down on the bureaucratic BS instituted by the government when they created the health insurance nightmare in the ’70′s we could reduce the cost and keep the quality and not give up our freedom to choose which treatments we want to take.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 5:13 pm by The Flannel Avenger and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.