My Health-Care Alternative for the Old and Poor; Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with a simple debit card will result in better-quality care, for less.
It's time to move beyond ObamaCare.</br></br>Whether it is struck down by the Supreme Court, defunded by Congress, or simply collapses from its unsustainable costs and the impossibly complicated bureaucracy it seeks to impose, ObamaCare won't work. It will depress the economy, increase the national debt, discourage medical innovation, and erode the quality of health care.</br></br>The fundamental mistake of ObamaCare's architects is that they refused to recognize the systemic failure of government-provided health-care. Medicare and Medicaid had begun malfunctioning long before Nancy Pelosi bribed and bullied Congress into approving President Obama's health-care bill. Now we need to begin assembling the components of a replacement plan that works better than ObamaCare and more efficiently than the current system.</br></br>To that end, I am introducing the Choice in Healthcare Act, which will create a voluntary, 10-year pilot program for a new health-care delivery system, beginning in June 2013.</br></br>Geared toward low-income individuals and seniors, this simple plan will replace participants' Medicare and Medicaid benefits with roughly equivalent funds put on a debit-style "Medi-choice" card. Participants can then use their card to buy the health insurance of their choice on the open market and to pay for out-of-pocket expenses such as co-payments and deductibles. In succeeding years the card's funding level will be adjusted for inflation, and any unused funds will roll over to the next year.