Coburn’s Healthcare Blueprint

The Wall Street journal is reporting on Tom Coburn’s efforts for a health care solution that doesn’t put us all in danger of Nanny State SIDS.

That debate is about the future of health-care reform, and it got some momentum this week when Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn released a big-ideas blueprint for restructuring the entire health-care system–the tax code, Medicare, tort liability, insurance laws–along free-market lines. Dr. Coburn’s plan builds on the White House’s own bold proposal in January to revamp tax laws so as to put consumers back in control of their health-care decisions. Both plans are about fundamental, bottom-up health-care reforms, cast in the language of markets, consumers and individual control.

Coburn’s Senate page has this to say about the plan:

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), a practicing physician and member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), today introduced the “Universal Health Care Choice and Access Act,” a comprehensive health care reform plan. U.S. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), who also is a member of the HELP committee, joined Dr. Coburn as an original co-sponsor.

…

“Government-run, ‘Big Brother’ health care plans that some politicians are vowing to revive would drive-up tax rates, strangle our economy and deprive the most vulnerable individuals in society of basic health coverage. The seductive rhetoric behind ‘Big Brother’ health care hides the fact that socialized systems stay afloat by rationing care and letting people die before their time. In the United Kingdom, for example, cancer patients sometimes have to wait a year between their diagnosis and first chemotherapy treatment. That approach to health care is unconscionable,” Dr. Coburn said.

Provisions include encouraging prevention, shifting tax breaks towards individuals, creating a national market for health insurance so that consumers aren’t limited to local choices, clarifying the nature of health care costs, reforms portions of Medicare and provides states incentive to make Medicare less restrictive.

That last portion is extremely important. One massive HillaryCare program for the entire nation threatens all sorts of economic disruption. But the whole point of a multi-state nation with a limited national government was to allow for 50 labs where these ideas could be worked out and compete with each other. If HillaryCare is going to work so well, let’s let Minnesota, Iowa, and New Mexico prove it first. Once the national bureaucracy is created, any efforts to reform it will be a 50+ year effort of untold energy and political capital, and we’ve already got other problems that need our collective attention.

Keep up the good work Senator.

(kudos to Commonwealth Foundation’s Policy Blog for the find)