Policy Reform: add market-based reforms to Health Benefits Exchange

Provide more options for more people for affordable, quality, healthcare services!

The expansion of complex government and special-interest control over our highly personal healthcare decisions will not give Americans what they want. Rhode Islanders want access to quality care and the freedom to choose the best plans for their families!

As part of the Affordable Care Act and its Health Benefits Exchange, the state of Rhode Island, its health care providers, civic and community groups, and private citizens should embrace market- and patient-driven solutions to these challenges as part of a “Health Care Freedom Act“, including:

1. Increase the availability of care for both newly insured and the remaining uninsured by eliminating regulatory obstacles to new, innovative providers of health care services including the “Certificate of Need” law that blocks competition for medical facilities and regulations that stifle ‘retail health clinics’ such as MinuteClinic.

2. Expand the availability of health care financing to those left out of the Affordable Care Act by allowing consumers to purchase low-cost ‘mandate-free’ policies and insurance regulated in other states, as well as promoting the availability of non-insurance alternatives such as ‘Health Sharing Ministries’ and critical-illness policies.

3. Build on the Affordable Care Act’s pricing and transparency reforms by adopting and utilizing ‘bundled’ or ‘packaged’ prices for episodes of care and embracing real ‘cash’ prices for consumers purchasing their own health care services from physicians and hospitals.

4. Transform health care for government workers by embracing consumer-driven plans that lower costs while continuing to deliver high-quality, accessible care.

5. Renew the state’s innovative Medicaid waiver and modernize it to provide beneficiaries with health care funding mechanisms similar to Health Savings Account for appropriate populations.

6. Prohibit automatic enrollment in other social service programs via the health benefits portal

The result of embracing these and other market- and consumer-driven policies in health care can make Rhode Island the national leader in delivering high-quality, accessible, and affordable care to its people, helping to create prosperity by relieving the taxpayers and the private sector of the high burden of health care costs.

Read about the Center’s “Healthcare Freedom Act” here …

Go to our Healthcare home page here … 

Read how gov’t bureaucrats are planning to transform the “health benefits portal” into a DEPENDENCY PORTAL …