Bush’s health care plan affordable for more Americans

To Talk of Many Things

The ability of Americans to obtain adequate health care is one of the most challenging issues facing the country today. According to the Washington Post, the growth in health care costs exceeded that of per capita gross domestic product by 12.6 percent between 1980 and 2004, and the gap is expected to grow another 7.2 percent in 10 years.

President Bush has proposed a set of ideas to make health care more affordable for many more Americans, and it is interesting to examine some of the most unique parts of the plan. The initiatives put forth in the president’s proposal aim to harness the power of the free market to see that more Americans have access to better quality medical care. By encouraging greater competition in the health care industry and by granting patients the power to choose what type of care they desire most, more Americans may be able to receive medical attention for considerably lower costs.

One of the most prominent features of the president’s health care program is the use of new tax-free savings accounts given to individuals so that they may have save money to cover medical expenses. Under the plan, individuals may set up these Health Savings Accounts when they purchase a high-deductible health care policy to cover major costs. A HSA is fully owned by the individual so that no one else can touch it, and the government cannot tax money directed into the account.

HSAs can enable Americans to save substantial sums of money on health insurance and taxes while exercising more personal control over their own health care spending. An HSA can be carried from job to job, and from year to year tax-free to pay for routine medical expenses.

To give individuals more choice in health care, the president wants to allow individuals to buy the best coverage they can find anywhere in the country. He hopes that the expanded use of HSAs will make that task easier for more people by granting them the ability to use money in health accounts with helpful tax benefits. In a competitive health care industry, more health care coverage may become available to more people, and competition among providers can help to drive down costs of coverage. It is not yet clear how effective HSAs will be in making more coverage available, but they certainly have the potential improve people’s health situations.

Should these ideas work as planned, the burden on government-provided health care through Medicare and Medicaid will be lessened because private enterprise can offer patients many more choices in health coverage. When there is only a single governmental source of health care, however, there is no economic incentive to improve the quality of the health service. The state-centered health system is permanent, and therefore has no need to adapt to consumers’ needs and demands. The economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1944, "Private monopoly is scarcely ever complete and even more rarely of long duration or able to disregard potential competition. But a state monopoly is always a state-protected monopoly — protected against both potential competition and effective criticism."

Nationalized health coverage provided in countries such as Canada and Sweden tend to encourage long waiting lines for patients, who have no other place to look to. When the free marketplace offers a wide variety of private heath care, however, individual consumers are at a much greater advantage because they can freely choose what coverage is best for them. Individualism can accomplish astonishing feats when given the opportunity to do so.

Jonathan Kelly is a senior political science major.