Empowering Health Care Consumers Through Tax Reform

by Arnett, Grace-Marie

• ISBN13: 9780472067169
• ISBN10: 0472067168
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

For decades, policymakers at all levels of government have struggled to meet citizens' demands to contain the costs of health care, expand access to coverage and services, and maintain quality. Legislators' efforts to fix the current system have produced many counter-productive responses. Consumers have little freedom and few choices in purchasing health care. Empowering Health Care Consumers through Tax Reform offers a solution to this problem by proposing a system that provides a dynamic and competitive marketplace in which consumers make their own health care decisions. This book examines the option created by the intersection of health policy and tax reform. Health policy analysts, economists, employer group and union representatives, physicians, and political leaders examine the crucial link between two major domestic policy issues to explore a revolutionary idea: that health-care costs can be contained and access to care vastly expanded by joining health care reform with tax reform. The contributors describe the distortions in the health care system caused by our current tax policy and paint their vision of a vibrant and responsive free-market system. This vision of tax reform coupled with health reform is offered as a win-win scenario for consumers, the medical profession, policymakers, and the future U.S. health care system. "This book shows how tax reform can lead to more appropriate and more affordable health insurance. It is worth careful reading by our policy makers and by anyone concerned with health care in America." --Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics, Harvard University and Former Chairman, President's Council of Economic Advisors Grace-Marie Arnett is president of the Galen Institute, a public policy research organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that focuses on health and tax policy.

Table of Contents

Introductory Reading
About the Consensus Group	xii
About the Galen Institute	xv
Preface A Fair Health Insurance System	xix
Jack Faris
Introduction and Overview Empowering Health Care Consumers through Tax Reform	xxv
Grace-Marie Arnett
COMMISSIONED CONTRIBUTIONS
The Tax Treatment of Health Insurance: Early History and Evidence, 1940-1970	1	(26)
Robert B. Helms
What's Wrong with the Present System	27	(8)
Michael Tanner
High Anxiety: Working Families Need Market-Based Health Care Reform	35	(20)
Robert Emmet Moffit
An Efficient and Equitable Approach to Health Reform	55	(16)
Mark V. Pauly
A Better Subsidy for Health Insurance?	71	(22)
C. Eugene Steuerle
Gordon B. T. Mermin
Improving the System for Delivering Subsidies: Cap or Scrap the Exclusion?	93	(16)
John S. Hoff
Toward a Universal Marketplace for Health Care	109	(10)
David B. Kendall
Health Care Reform: Why Not Try Real Insurance?	119	(12)
Norman B. Ture
Stephen J. Entin
Restructuring the Current Health Insurance Tax Subsidy to Cover the Uninsured	131	(14)
Kevin Vigilante
Christopher D' Arcy
Tammy Reina
Medical Savings Accounts: An Idea Whose Time Has Come	145	(28)
John C. Goodman
INVITED CONTRIBUTIONS
Promoting a Consumer-Driven Health Care System	173	(10)
Senator Robert F. Bennett
The Role of a Universal Health Credit in Welfare and Tax Reform	183	(8)
Representative Thomas E. Petri
The Worker's Right to Choose	191	(4)
Edward Ryan Moffit
Healing the Physician-Patient Relationship	195	(56)
Sewell H. Dixon
APPENDICES AND INDEX
Appendix A About the Authors	201	(10)
Appendix B A Vision for Consumer-Driven Health Care Reform Health Policy Consensus Group	211	(12)
Appendix C Tax Reform: The Heart of Health Care Reform	223	(6)
Appendix D Petition on Health Policy Reform	229	(22)
Index	251