Dr. Ben Carson

"How Should Healthcare Work?" +

3:02 video, April 8, 2014.

[Music] Dr. Ben Carson, M.D.: Okay, the way I would like to see health care fashioned is in a way that would put the responsibility in the hands of the patient and the healthcare provider. 

What do you need for good healthcare?  You need a patient and you need a healthcare provider.  Along came the, the middleman to facilitate the relationship and now the middleman is the primary entity with the patient and the healthcare provider at its beck and call.  That doesn't make any sense.

What I'd like to see is a system where we have health savings accountsxxeverybody in America has a health savings account.  It can be populated with $2,000 every year.  If you don't use it, it just continues to accumulate, and a third of it has to be designated for catastrophic or bridge insurance, and you give people the ability to shift funds within a family.  So if one member of the family needs a little more, other members of the family can shift some of theirs to that individual.  It makes every family their own insurance company, provides an enormous amount of flexibility, and when you die you can pass it on to a family member.

That would give us an enormous amount of flexibility because 80-percent of the encounters are going to be handed, handled through the health savings account, you don't have a big burden on your major medicals and your catastrophic insurance, so the costs of that will plummet.  It makes it much easier to acquire, and I would make that something that you could acquire from anyplacexxany place in the country, any place in the world if they met our insurance standards.

Bring it into the free market, that makes it work much better.  It has to incorporate tort reform.  You have to have electronic medical records, but I would embed them in a microchip that the patient can keep rather than have them floating in cyberspace because I think people's medical information is much to private and much too important to be floating around in cyberspace.

Those are some of the major components of the program, and I think that could be done for considerably less money than we're spending.  Even if the government populates everyone's health savings account, you know, all 315 million of us with $2,000 a year, that's $630 billion, that's not a whole lot compared to what we are spending now, and everybody would have health care.  And you could always add more to it on your own.  Your employer could add to it, anybody could add on to it, but everybody would have basic care, and that's what we're trying to do.
 

Notes:  A nice issue-oriented video.  Dr. Carson clearly explains his proposal and steers clear of easy Obamacare attacks.