There’s a lot to like in Texas Congressman Chip Roy’s plan to provide series of market-based alternatives to the bloated and inefficient healthcare status quo in the United States.
Dubbed “The Case for Healthcare Freedom” and released in January of this year, the report offers a scathing review of the patched-together healthcare and health insurance options Americans are forced to choose in our over-regulated system, while also promoting some worthwhile reforms that would empower patients and consumers.
Roy’s contributions to the public debate on the fate of Obamacare subsidies, Medicare and Medicaid spending, and the need for market-based alternatives are top-tier for a conservative congressman, and do highlight many smart reforms.
Considering Roy also worked for a brief period as a vice president and policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and was active in the debates on expanding Medicaid and the woes of American healthcare only underlines this point.
Let’s take a quick look at some immediate recommendations found in Roy’s plan, many of which we’ve also championed at the Consumer Choice Center:
- Expand Health Savings Accounts to all Americans regardless of health coverage (HSAs)
- Promote alternative health delivery models (direct primary care, health-sharing ministries, etc.)
- Allow both short-term and long-term catastrophic health insurance plans
- Make health plans portable and not tied to employers
- Expand telemedicine
- Embrace legal reform to reduce defensive medical costs
- Remove regulatory barriers and barriers to competition in the health sector
- Policy shifts from coverage to care
- Repeal Certificate of Need laws that limit new hospital construction
- Remove the restrictions on physician ownership of hospitals
- Halting agricultural subsidies that prop up unhealthy foods
- Encourage faster approvals of drugs
Each of these are worth exploring themselves, and should provide plenty of fodder for legislative proposals.
Roy’s plan focuses on market-based mechanisms and a paradigm shift for how Americans should view healthcare.
Rather than looking to the federal government to create an entirely new system reliant on subsidies and bureaucratic management, “healthcare freedom” rests on the premise of empowering consumers and patients to make more health decisions on their own in a more competitive and free market for delivery of care.
This is a win-win on many counts.
For one, it reduces the outsized role of government spending in our healthcare and health insurance system, which has a demonstrable inflationary impact.
Second, it restores true market incentives to practitioners to directly offer services to patients.
Third, it seeks to eliminate the barriers to competition that unnecessarily restrict plans and services that consumers want, including catastrophic health plans, the expansion of HSAs, the onerous rules placed on hospitals and hospital ownership, and the elimination of subsidies that lock employees into employer health plans.
The “healthcare freedom” plan is a long policy document with some superfluous partisan paragraphs and sections, but it’s an excellent foundation for a true healthcare reform. It recognizes how constrained freedom of choice has become in our existing system, and seeks to draw down the significant regulatory burdens that make simple health choices vastly more expensive.
If the GOP and Republicans would like to present an alternative to the Obamacare status quo, forever reliant on subsidies and consolidation by favored industries, packaging many of the reforms offered by Rep. Roy would be a significant improvement that whatever is on offer today.
Yaël Ossowski is deputy director at the Consumer Choice Center.
