Comments about ‘Utah looking at Missouri health insurance model’

On the surface this sounds good but it still does nothing to bring down the cost of health care. Having insurance doesn't guarantee health care. It just looks good on paper. States need to break up the monopolized health care providers, the real cause of high health care. The only thing I can figure is the legislators must have investments in the health care monopoly. As time goes on, even this system will meet its limits and become a burden all over again. And lets not forget that these health care benefits will be taxable income with a new president. Providing insurance is not the answer to getting americans good health care, its escalating profiteering by monopolized health care.

This is a good start, but they need to look at Florida as well.

Florida did the radical thing of removing all health care mandates. A health care mandate means that all health care plans have to carry the mandate, whether the customer needs that program or can afford it.

By removing all health care mandates a family of 4 can get a basic health insurance plan (doctors visists, emergency room, catastrophic) for $150/month!!

In Florida they also changed their medicare. They gave the patience basically a voucher per procedure and the freedom to choose which doctors they went to. The patience were much more thoughtful in who they went to and the doctors were now in competition with other doctors so costs went down and quality of service went up.

Between these two changes the number of uninsured in Florida has gone down significantly and overall costs have also gone down by 8%!

Utah needs to follow the lead of Florday first, Missouri second. If we did both...holy cow will we see some great reform!

Sadly, Florida style reform will never happen in Utah because of the monopoly enjoyed by IHC. They would block these types of reforms.

With a stroke of the pen, this whole issue becomes mute. Simply forbie ALL health insurance from paying greater than 80% of the actual costs-ie they reimburse the patient 80% of what the patient pays.

As a health care provider, I have seen the power of this method in practice. The patients immediately question all costs, procedures, and prescriptions. They become much tighter "managed care" consumers than they ever were with HMO's. When the patient has skin in the game, all costs for everyone come down, and come down very quickly-AND the patients are much happier to have saved a buck and are not angry that some HMO beaurocrat has rationed their care. The Utah House Candidate from Sandy-Wayne Crawford-understands this and is prepared to propose legislation that will facilitate this scenario.