I’m not a socialist, but I do think there is a better way to provide health care than we have now. 

1) The first would be set insurance rates according to people’s lifestyle habits. 

    Many people are digging their graves with their own forks, or are engaged in unhealthy sports or risky sex. 

2) Treat medicine like a public utility, with regulated costs, charges and profit. 

     To handle this, create ’Community Health Cooperatives’ to provide healthcare and insurance. 

    For example, for every dollar that an investor assigns to any type of investment, 3% automatically goes into a healthcare fund.     

    This money would be used to buy hospitals and provide partial scholarships for nurses and doctors.* 

3) Audit the profits of health insurance companies and set profit limits; 

    charge according to expenses, as a community cooperative should do, not according to profit targets. 

4) Set limits on malpractice and flawed-medicine lawsuits. 

    Prison time AND financial penalties would reduce premeditated malpractice events. 

    (And hospital administration machination, as we saw with COVID)

5) Limit the % of $$$ lawyers can receive from successful medical lawsuits. 

 * If we subsidize part of healthcare education cost, we can pay healthcare workers lower wages

    without reducing their quality of life. 

We shouldn’t pay all education costs. Americans don’t need people caring for them that chose healthcare as a career because the degree was free. Healthcare workers need to have some skin in the game, especially if they are in dermatology. 

One problem in healthcare is the cyclical shortage of nurses. 

One reason for this is the shortage of nursing teachers, who must be nurses by training, but can make more money practicing nursing than teaching nursing. If this is the case, why is a nursing education so expensive? Who is getting all the gravy? 

Medicare Audits.

One way to catch Medicare fraud is through Medicare audits, where Medicare files are pulled at random and patients are contacted to verify they received the treatment that M&M is being charged for. 

Good idea, right? Yes, Quality Control. However, auditors are expensive, when they are paid wages. 

What about volunteer auditors, who do the initial rummaging through billing records, turning over suspicious cases to the regular auditors. This could be a productive outlet for many retirees. Especially in high-retiree states. Especially with retired IRS auditors? 

 Eric J. Rose