State of Rhode Island Archives: on Health Care

Bob Flanders: Supports HSAs, cross-state insurance, and tort reform

• Allow people to buy coverage across state lines, thereby increasing competition & breaking up health care monopolies.
• Require pricing transparency for the costs of radiologic and other diagnostic procedures.
• Permit trade and other industry and business associations to provide less costly health care plans to their members.
• Encourage the use of health care savings accounts.
• Enact medical malpractice reforms.
• While these reforms will help restore affordability, all plans must cover pre-existing conditions
• Medicaid expansion will place stress on overburdened state budgets. This problem can be mitigated if states are given the flexibility to more efficiently serve Medicaid recipients.

Bob Flanders: Drugs Affordability Act: negotiate Medicare drug prices

• Control prescription drug price increases by creating an enforcement mechanism to identify drugs that have unreasonable price increases and impose penalties on their manufacturers.
• Permit Medicare Part D to negotiate drug prices to leverage federal purchasing power, crack down on price gouging, and restrain the growth in prescription prices with justification required for substantial price increases.
• Require transparency in drug pricing by requiring manufacturers to publicly disclose significant price increases, e.g., over 100% annually.

Barry Hinckley: ObamaCare is an example of government gone wild

Barry Hinckley: Voucher program provides Medicare choice

The moderator then asked Hinckley if he would support a voucher program, which would give seniors the option to choose Medicare or a private insurer. "When you walk into a restaurant, do you want one choice or two?" Hinckley asked. "Medicare is going out of business and it's not good for any American. He maintained there needs to be bi-partisan effort to solve the problem. "The Senate won't even debate it, they shoot it down without a debate," he said. "The government has no track record of running things on budget and if you think they're going to run healthcare efficiently, I have another thing to tell you."

Mark Zaccaria: System works now, even for the uninsured

A: It might not be if the plan to deliver it costs more that we are spending today as a society and especially if the actual care that it delivers is less than what we all enjoy today. Today in America virtually anyone who needs emergency medical care can receive it by going to the ER at a public hospital. The short term payments the care facility must receive just to keep their doors open will be covered by the Payee of Last Resort: The American Taxpayer. That's the state of medical coverage today. Most of the political plans that are currently being floated for Universal Healthcare in America involve both increasing federal government bureaucracy and further regulating existing private health insurance providers. Doing the first thing increases costs in a way that cannot be forecast. Doing the second could add even bigger burdens to the very organizations we say we want to task with providing all that care.

Lincoln Chafee: Bipartisanship is the key to reform Medicare

Lincoln Chafee: Support Canadian drug importation that Laffey opposes

Stephen Laffey: Medicare has to be able to negotiate

Stephen Laffey: Embryonic stem cell research has produced no benefit