5) Immediate free and total health care, including at home, for patients who have been victimized by malpractice adjudicated by a panel of legal, medical, and consumer experts. Clear and egregious offenders, physicians and hospitals, shall be suspended from practice, pending corrective investigation and measures. If death is a result of malpractice, survivors are entitled to compensation, though less, similar to the families of the 9/11 tragedy. Malpractice lawsuits shall be terminated; malpractice insurance shall end and a percentage of savings passed on to the malpractice fund.

This is the time to challenge insurance companies for their obscene increase on physician’s malpractice insurance rates that have been overblown by lawsuits, which in fact has little to do with raising the rates. The logical approach, however dramatic, is to end such insurance altogether and forcing health care costs downward. A board of trustees should be devised to investigate the validity of malpractice cases and take appropriate measures to ease any tragic findings. The board should consist of professors of medical universities, judges and lawyers divorced from individual cases, and sensitive consumers who study the costs of health. There should be no argument that this violates free enterprise since medical insurance should not be for unseemly profit; nor should citizens expect undue gain from tragedy. There are far too many negligible events resulting in tragedy that do not result in compensation, such as the horror of violent crime.

Elaborate 6:

6) The prescription drug law for seniors should be repealed and replaced by a governmental agency to purchase prescriptions by bulk and the savings passed on to seniors requiring long term medicine under Medicare.

This would not unduly affect the Walgreens of the nation, since most of their pharmaceutical business is on one prescription with the potential of one refill. Long term illness and disease, affecting senior citizens, require almost infinite refills that can best be filled by bulk mailing at dramatically lower cost. Therefore, the current law defies economic logic and must be repealed for the good of seniors and the country. The law only aggravates the already explosive costs of health care and the national budget.

Elaborate 7:

 7) Price-controls must be enacted on the entire medical industry, including insurance premiums for a period of three years until sanity is returned. Price controls also on tuition of all universities.

Wall Street savvy investors know the best place to put their money: anything to do with medicine and its research. To profiteer on the nation’s illness is unconscionable, and to continue on the speedy highway to even more profits is unforgivable and a sordid reflection of the nation’s image. It must be stopped and preferably rolled back — including the $5 charge to inpatients for aspirin.

As for the profiteering in higher education, such as presidents receiving outrageous salaries, the textbook robber barons, the registrars’ untiring demand for higher tuition, is a disgrace to an egalitarian society that proclaims education as the primacy of its spirit.

Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: March 1, 2004.