Making Medicare Work: Ensuring Coverage in an Age of Exploding Costs

Perspective detail: Making Medicare Work: Ensuring Coverage in an Age of Exploding Costs

Perspective 3: Make Health Care in Retirement a Matter of Personal Choice, not a Shared Responsibility

We would be better off if Medicare were no longer a public program for older Americans. Instead, it should be replaced by a combination of required and voluntary individual medical savings accounts. This approach would make health care in old age more a matter of personal responsibility, rather than a government or social responsibility. This would encourage people to take care of themselves, while relying on market forces to bring costs down.

Therefore, we should:

Replace Medicare with a system of medical savings accounts for the retirement years, similar to the tax-deferred retirement accounts that millions of Americans already manage for themselves. People would use these accounts in retirement to pay routine medical bills as well as premiums on catastrophic illness insurance.
Maintain a free market that will respond to individual consumer choices by minimizing regulations on doctors, insurance companies and drug companies.

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