Free Market Solutions – A Much Needed Shot in the Arm for American Healthcare

A robust healthcare program is one that reaches the masses and leaves a significant impact on their lives without burning a hole in anyone’s pocket. With some of the finest medical institutions and practitioners anywhere in the world, America is also a country with high medical costs owing to the significantly higher cost of drugs, diagnostic tests and medical procedures.

Did you know that heart surgery in India, performed by top cardio surgeons using state-of-the-art technology, would cost somewhere between $1,800 and $2,000. That’s merely 2% of the average $90,000 that heart surgery costs in the US?

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

It is with the objective of making healthcare accessible and affordable that the former US administration under Barack Obama’s Presidency launched the much talked about Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often dubbed as Obamacare.

However, free-market solutions are the much-needed shot in the arm for improving the state of the American healthcare system. There are two distinct examples at hand.

#1 – Healthcare.Gov

There were reportedly 18 written warnings citing mismanagement and delays issued two years before the October 2013 launch of Healthcare.gov, a health insurance exchange website. What happened next was a “well-documented disaster,” in the words of President Obama himself, and carried an enormous cost to the US exchequer.

The website – built at an estimated cost of $2,142 million – crashed within 2 hours of its launch. This was largely because instead of engaging some of the brightest minds in the Silicon Valley, the supervision of the portal was left to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency operating under the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the website development to contractors such as CGI Group in Canada.

#2 – Need for Health Insurance

Healthcare never was or can never be a one-size-fits-all approach. There are huge complexities involved, making it even more important for healthcare to be ridden by government over-regulation.

So, here’s the second case at hand, and it is centered around finding an answer to the all-important question: do we really need health insurance? What is really needed is a safeguard of individual interest and that of their dependents with respect to unforeseen risks, rather than of the routine and expected medical conditions that arise from one’s own negligence in most cases. Increased government interference citing healthcare as a fundamental right, therefore, seems flawed.

Healthcare reforms in the truest sense of the ideology must look at empowering patients to take their own healthcare decisions instead of being restricted through government regulations. Several policy reforms are needed to bring about an all-inclusive, progressive, dependable, affordable and quality healthcare system that can promote personal ownership of healthcare through free-market channels instead of the way they are framed at present.