Empowering Health Care Consumers..tax..

9780472097166

0472097164

For decades, policymakers at all levels of government have struggled to meet citizens' demands to contain the costs of health care, expand access to coverage and services, and maintain quality. Legislators' efforts to fix the current system have produced many counter-productive responses. Consumers have little freedom and few choices in purchasing health care. Empowering Health Care Consumers through Tax Reform offers a solution to this problem by proposing a system that provides a dynamic and competitive marketplace in which consumers make their own health care decisions. This book examines the option created by the intersection of health policy and tax reform. Health policy analysts, economists, employer group and union representatives, physicians, and political leaders examine the crucial link between two major domestic policy issues to explore a revolutionary idea: that health-care costs can be contained and access to care vastly expanded by joining health care reform with tax reform. The contributors describe the distortions in the health care system caused by our current tax policy and paint their vision of a vibrant and responsive free-market system. This vision of tax reform coupled with health reform is offered as a win-win scenario for consumers, the medical profession, policymakers, and the future U.S. health care system. "This book shows how tax reform can lead to more appropriate and more affordable health insurance. It is worth careful reading by our policy makers and by anyone concerned with health care in America." --Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics, Harvard University and Former Chairman, President's Council of Economic Advisors Grace-Marie Arnett is president of the Galen Institute, a public policy research organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that focuses on health and tax policy.