The Choices for All Project will be launched during an event at Hoover’s Washington, DC, office on Thursday, July 27.
Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – The Hoover Institution has published a new policy plan focused on delivering lower cost, better-quality, and more accessible health care for millions of Americans.
The coauthors of The Choices for All Project, Lanhee Chen, the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies, and policy fellows Tom Church and Daniel Heil, offer healthcare reforms that would jump-start competition, increase price transparency, and restore consumer sovereignty to the healthcare market.
Advocates of “Medicare for All,” or the public option, argue that prices aren’t feasible in healthcare, especially in cases of emergency and when the patient is uninsured. But as the authors maintain, the rules of supply and demand apply to healthcare just as they do in any other market. Centralized health care, like all other centralized economic activity, distorts prices by not providing useful information about value or cost and takes choices away from the consumer. Conversely, if providers offer meaningful prices and genuine choices, patients could make better-informed healthcare decisions. Prices could also be reduced while preserving healthcare quality and access.
The Choices for All Project proposes the following four market-oriented reforms intended to empower individuals to take control of their healthcare decisions; protect vulnerable populations while supporting them on their path toward self-sufficiency; create competitive markets of healthcare services and insurance coverage capable of meeting diverse needs; and lowering healthcare costs by promoting price transparency and reducing the reliance on third-party payment.
- Create Individual Health Accounts (IHAs), tax-advantaged savings accounts that encourage customers to save for their long-term healthcare needs and choose lower-premium plans, such as catastrophic coverage.
- Extend tax deductibility to all out-of-pocket (OOP) medical payments, reducing the tax advantage given to employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) premiums.
- Widen the available supply of healthcare by removing complicated state and local rules that reduce the number of practicing doctors and nurses; alleviating restrictions on building and expanding healthcare facilities; and liberalizing insurance rules that unnecessarily limit choice.
- Empower Medicaid recipients and Affordable Care Act (ACA) participants with proposed measures including: expanding waiver authority under the ACA so that reforms can be facilitated at the state level; permitting state healthcare exchanges to offer a broader variety of plans, including low-cost catastrophic care plans that enable patients to transfer the remainder of their ACA subsidy balance into an IHA; and supporting more state flexibility on implementing Medicaid programs to better meet the needs of the residents and unique conditions of their jurisdictions.
In the study, the authors maintain that these reforms should not eliminate existing options. The proposals offer the possibility of new choices that offer clear benefits to consumers while improving their incentives to think deeply about the kind of medical care they purchase.
“In Choices for All, we articulate the next generation of market-based health reform,” said Lanhee Chen. “Instead of litigating the battles of the past, we propose a number of reforms to improve American health care for the better by expanding patient choices, lowering health costs, and preserving the elements in our system that work. It’s our hope that policymakers and citizens alike will see our ideas as a serious contribution to the ongoing debate about how to make our healthcare system work better for everyone.”
Tom Church said, “The American healthcare system will remain broken until patients see prices before they receive care, not weeks after, when their insurance company or the government decides what they will pay. Our proposed Individual Health Accounts will encourage tens of millions of patients to retake control over their healthcare from third-party payers.”
“Many Americans remain unsatisfied with their health care choices,” added Daniel Heil, “and many policymakers think the answer is to eliminate options. We disagree. In Choices for All we offer reforms that expand consumer choices while improving the incentives embedded in our healthcare system.”
Click here to read The Choices for All Project.
Information on DC Launch Event
The launch event will take place at Hoover’s Washington, DC, office on Thursday, July 27, at 4:00 p.m. and will feature remarks by Lanhee Chen and US Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas.
Hoover Institution in DC
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About the Authors
Lanhee Chen is the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution and director of Domestic Policy Studies and lecturer in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University.
Tom Church is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution. He studies healthcare policy, entitlement reform, income inequality, poverty, and the federal budget.
Daniel L. Heil is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution. He studies the federal budget, tax policy, and federal antipoverty programs.
For coverage opportunities, contact Jeffrey Marschner, 202-760-3187, jmarsch@stanford.edu.
