A Republican plan for Health Care Reform by saying “we can”

Florida Congressman Adam Putnam writes in the St. Petersburg Times:

We can do a better job of managing outcomes in America. About 75 percent of all medical spending goes to managing and treating chronic disease. By encouraging wellness and prevention programs, we can incentivize people to lose weight, get healthier, manage their diabetes and lower their cholesterol or blood pressure.

We can adjust rules to use existing technology to allow the sharing of electronic medical records and health information to help eliminate mistakes that cost up to 98,000 lives a year. The ability to quickly share patient information would benefit all Americans, but it would be especially important for our snowbird neighbors who live part of the year in Florida and part of the year in other states.

We can improve access and choices for patients by encouraging a thriving market-based competition in health care that allows doctors to decide what specialty they want to train for and patients to decide what hospital to go to. We can make medical billings and evaluations of doctors and clinics more transparent, allowing patients to make better informed decisions about the cost and quality of treatment.

We can allow people to purchase insurance across state lines, expanding competition and driving costs lower.

And we can preserve and improve competition by establishing small business health plans. These plans would extend the benefits currently enjoyed by large corporations and labor unions to every small business in America. Under such a system, individual restaurants could join together to have the bargaining power of McDonald’s. Or independent businesspeople like real estate agents could work together to have the bargaining power of a Fortune 100 company.

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