If Toffel were the healthcare czar, he would dump the "50-state patchwork" of private insurance programs that can't cross state borders and switch to competing national plans that would be required to take all comers, with no exemptions for preexisting conditions.
Then he would reinstate federal regulations abandoned in the 1980s that limited insurance companies' fees. Freedom from those limitations, Toffel believes, was part of what caused healthcare to shift from its mission of treating the sick to the business of printing money.
Toffel would also move away from employment-based healthcare, with companies paying higher salaries, instead, so employees can shop for a suitable plan and carry it with them from one job to the next.
On point four, Toffel would cap frivolous malpractice suits across the nation, as California did many years ago.
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If Toffel were king, every teaching hospital in the nation would have but one mission -- treating the uninsured residents of its own community, as County-USC has done.
If there's a publicly funded component to Toffel's plan, it's that such schools would be subsidized as necessary with grants and a variety of federal, state and local funding.
For the last bit about how to help the uninsured, there is a great example of what could be happening on a broader scale called RAM, Remote Area Medical. They are providing free healthcare (regular checkups, dentistry, vision, mammograms, etc) to 1,500 people a day for 8 days in Los Angeles. If a non-profit can do it, surely teaching hospitals should be able to do it inexpensively too, right?
Anyway, I was encouraged to read about this.
