Choice detail: Health Care

Choice 1: Use free market competition to maximize personal choice while making the system more efficient

The main problem with America's health care system is that costs keep going up. The best way to solve this is to reduce regulation and use free market competition to help more Americans get health insurance at a lower cost. Individuals should take greater responsibility for both their personal health and their health care.

We should also embrace managed care, which tracks expenses and, for a time during the 1990s, slowed cost increases. By moving further in the direction of managed care and adopting medical savings accounts, which encourage individuals to save and shop around for health care, we'll be able to bring down costs and cover more people. Overall, we should minimize the government's role in health care and let the private sector do as much as possible.


Therefore, we should:

  • Require that all Americans who aren't already covered buy their own insurance but let them make their own choices in the marketplace.
  • Offer tax credits and tax-free medical savings accounts to make it easier for people to buy individual coverage.
  • Allow private insurers to create basic, high-deductible policies that would cover the most common problems and provide government subsidies and tax deductions to make coverage affordable for small businesses and people who need to buy their own insurance. People would still be insured against catastrophic illnesses, but would have to pay more out-of-pocket for other health services.
  • Encourage more employers to provide coverage through HMOs and other forms of managed care to ensure competition.
  • Encourage small businesses to join together in insurance pools to negotiate for better rates.
  • Encourage the use of lower-cost generic drugs and allow people to buy approved drugs from Canada and Europe. Charge patients more if they insist on brand-name drugs.
  • Work with industry and all interested parties to reduce costs.

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