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Let individuals have the opportunity to select and own their health insurance policies and they will become more responsible, market forces will control cost and quality, and lack of portability will cease to be an issue.
Joel Karlin, M.D., a member of the American Medical Association's (AMA) Council on Legislation and chair of its Individual Insurance Subcommittee, enthusiastically advocated this major restructuring of the traditional way Americans receive health insurance in a special address to the APA Assembly on May 31 in Toronto.
Severing the link between employers and the ownership of health insurance policies will end a system in which ratcheting down insurance costs takes precedence over quality. Doing so will also remove a considerable amount of waste from the nation's health care system, since employees will more easily see the link between usage and cost, said Karlin, an allergist in the Denver area and a former president of the Colorado Medical Society.
A system shift so radical would require Congress to amend the tax code governing health insurance expenses so that the dollar value the employer provides to purchase health insurance is no longer taxed as part of employees' annual income.
The employee would, Karlin envisions, take those dollars into the marketplace and bargain for the best insurance deal he or she could get. He noted that he had introduced this proposal at a recent session of the AMA House of Delegates, which endorsed the concept. He also expects to see legislation to accomplish this change introduced in Congress soon.