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Every American should be able to expect certain standards, freedoms, benefits, and opportunities form a twenty-first-century health system. If they are willing to participate and be responsible, they will gain:
•Improved health;
•Longer lives with a much better quality of life;
•A more convenient, understandable and personalized experience -- all at a lower cost;
•Access to the best course of treatment for their particular illness and their unique characteristics;
•A system that fosters and encourages innovation, competition, and better outcomes for patients;
•A system that truly values the impact that medical innovation has on patients and their caregivers as well as on society as a whole;
•A government that facilitates and accelerates extraordinary opportunities to improve health and health care;
•Continuous but unobtrusive 24/7 monitoring of their general health, chronic conditions, and acute health problems;
•Access to the most modern medical knowledge and breakthroughs, including the most advanced technologies, therapies and drugs, unimpeded by government-imposed price controls or rationing;
•The chance to increase their personal knowledge by learning from a transparent system of information about their diagnosis, costs and alternative solutions;
•A continuously improving, competitive, patient-focused medical world in which new therapies, new technologies, and new drugs are introduced as rapidly and safely as possible -- and not a day later;
•Greater price and market competition, innovation and smarter health care spending;
•A system of financing that includes insurance, government, charities, and self-funding that ensures access to health and health care for every American at the lowest possible cost without allowing financing and short-term budgetary considerations to distort and weaken the delivery of care;
•Genuine insurance to facilitate access to dramatically better care, rather than the current system, which is myopically focused on monthly or annual payments;
•A health system in which third parties and government bureaucrats do not impede the best course of treatment that doctors and their patients decide on;
•A health system in which seniors, veterans, or others under government health programs receive the same quality of care as their children in private markt systems.
Big reforms are required to transform today’s expensive, obsolete health bureaucracy into a system that conforms to these principles.
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