Saturday, October 24, 2009

Sane Health Care Reform


Here are some excellent health care reform proposals from Rep. Ron Paul.  (Being an actual M.D., he might know more about it that Barack, Nancy, Harry, etc.)  It would be worth your time to let your congress members know about these:

H.R. 2629, the Coercion is Not Health Care Act, stops government from taking even more of our money and railroading us into its health care scheme by preventing any individual or agency in the federal government from requiring anyone to purchase health insurance.  H.R. 2629 also prohibits conditioning the receipt of any government benefit or participation in any government program on the purchase or maintenance of health insurance.

H.R. 1495, the Comprehensive Health Care Reform Act of 2009, allows all Americans to pay their health care bills through the method that suits them best by providing all Americans with a tax credit for 100% of health care expenses (fully refundable against both income and payroll taxes), allowing individuals to roll over unused amounts in cafeteria plans and Flexible Savings Accounts (FSA), providing a tax credit for premiums for a high-deductible insurance policy connected with a Health Savings Account (HSA) and allowing seniors to use funds in an HSA to pay for a medigap policy, as well as making all medical expenses tax deductible by repealing the 7.5% threshold for the deduction of medical expenses.

H.R. 1498, the Freedom from Unnecessary Litigation Act of 2009, addresses rising medical malpractice costs by providing a tax credit for negative outcomes insurance purchased prior to medical treatment and by preventing medical malpractice awards obtained through binding arbitration from being taxed.

As Dr. Paul said in his speech introducing H.R. 1498, “Relying on negative outcomes insurance instead of litigation will also reduce the costs imposed on physicians, other health care providers, and hospitals by malpractice litigation.”

H.R. 2630, the Protect Patients and Physicians Privacy Act, allows patients and physicians to opt-out of any government-mandated or -funded system of electronic health care records and repeals the federal law creating an “unique patient identifier.”  It also denies the use of federal funds to advance the use of standard unique health identifiers in any federal, state, or private health care plan.

H.R. 3394, the Freedom of Health Speech Act, requires the FTC to actually prove health care claims are false before preventing those claims from being made, and H.R. 3395, the Health Freedom Act, ends the FDA’s attempts to censure truthful health claims.

These are just a few of steps Congressman Paul has taken in Congress to address the health care crisis.
Click here to get contact information for your representatives and urge them to support Dr. Paul’s health care reform legislation.

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