May 20th, 2010 by Arvin Vohra

A doc­tor recently said to me, “I’ll often write a pre­scrip­tion for a more expen­sive med­i­cine just because it has fewer let­ters.” His point was that there are no incen­tives any­where in the sys­tem to reduce health­care costs. Let’s bring those incen­tives back, and make med­i­cine truly uni­ver­sal through lower costs:

• Legal­ize higher deductible insur­ance. This would cre­ate price com­pe­ti­tion for basic med­ical ser­vices, and pre­vent insur­ance com­pa­nies from mark­ing up rou­tine services.
• Lower costs by allow­ing insur­ers to com­pete across state lines.
• End the sub­si­dies and pro­tec­tions given to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies. Right now med­i­cines in Amer­ica cost three times as much as iden­ti­cal med­i­cines (same for­mula, same name) in other coun­tries. It’s time to end that kind of cor­po­rate welfare.