Dear Congressperson, President Obama, State Legislators, and Staff,
As a concerned physician, I respectfully urge you to follow these three steps to help heal the health care system:
I. I respectfully request that you stop the passage of all health reform bills presently before Congress, for they will all make the health care system worse. National and state government need to heed the following:
1. Keep from actively administering any more health care plans or expanding any existing ones.
2. Federal government is not to influence or interfere with potential State Tort Reform bills or laws. It is only at the state level that the financial hemorrhaging in health care due to the Tort System itself and the concomitant practice of defensive medicine can be corrected. The current threat is Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s H.R. 3962 bill which is anti-State Tort Reform.
3. The Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, needs to again be respected by each state by allowing the purchase of health insurance from any other state, and stop interfering with same. Health insurance policies should be able to be kept for one’s lifetime.
4. Enact no individual mandates nor any employer mandates.
5. Enact no public option health insurance.
6. Enact no rationing capability to heath care legislation.
7. Enact no sanctions against physicians and / or patients for differing with a government guideline such as the CDC’s guideline as when not to give Tamiflu treatment for H1N1 flu, which could have possibly saved the life of a 14-year-old girl who died some 3 days after getting the flu.
8. Enact only bills short enough to be read and comprehended by all those voting.
II. Once the present bevy of health reform bills are stopped, the Senate and the House can focus on the individual blocks of constructive governmental reform bills that need to be enacted in order to help health the health care system. All bills should be with in 20-100 pages, and “clean” (with no “pork” added.)
Congress and President Obama need to do the following to move the health care industry towards a workable free enterprise system operating with constructive guidelines for today:
9. Keep health savings accounts intact and able to be integrated with health insurance policies (i.e. Whole Foods health insurance)
10. Remove government and other third party health insurance companies from making decisions most properly made by a patient and his/her physician; initiate constructive, more patient-friendly guidelines for the health insurance industry.
11. Constructive modifications could possibly be made to the governmental guidelines for the pharmaceutical industry.
III. Each bill to be proposed is to be transparent from its very beginning, and needs adequate time for full public discourse and debate on a national level with clear disclosure as to its most likely actual effects.
Our country needs these new governmental reforms – not health reform. We need patient-friendly governmental reforms to put patients in control with doctors as trusted advisors. Patients’ health care is not a political football, and should not be treated as such. More government run health insurance is not a constructive concept unless further socialism of medicine in our country is clearly the goal. If socialism is a goal, it should be clearly put before the whole nation for a vote. Many physicians will opt out of medicine instead of practising medicine as civil servants.
William A. Jones, M.D., lives in Fort Collins. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
