According to this morning’s Washington Post, the Bush Administration will be making several proposals to reform health care that may actually help move things in the right direction.
President Bush will propose that Americans be allowed to take tax deductions on more of their out-of pocket medical expenses, as part of an initiative the White House believes will rein in soaring health costs by shifting responsibility toward individuals, according to congressional and other sources familiar with the administration’s thinking.
The new tax breaks for personal health spending, to be included in the 2007 budget Bush will release in less than two weeks, are designed to help the uninsured and to allow people with insurance to write off a greater portion of the money they spend on co-payments, deductibles and care that is not covered. Under current tax rules, people can deduct medical expenses only if they exceed 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income.
The president also plans to call for an expansion of health savings accounts, an idea long favored by conservatives and approved by Congress slightly more than two years ago, in which people who buy bare-bones insurance policies are allowed to put money into tax-free accounts for their medical expenses.
Approved, but only sparingly implemented. Its ironic, if not hypocritical, that the left often cites health care as the one area where the free market has failed when it is emphatically clear that, thanks to government regulation, there has not been a true free market in health care in this country in decades, if ever.
Except for the resistence of the statists, there is no reason why the same principles that have revolutionized the rest of the business world cannot be applied to health care. While the reforms proposed by the Bush Administration are admittedly only baby steps in that direction, they are a start, and they should be supported by anyone whole supports free markets. Whether they will survive the inevitable D.C. political firestorm is another question.
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