Here's a novel idea on health care

Angst over the failed Obamacare health insurance program and questions about the putative replacement offered by the House makes my head hurt. What about a new idea? Let's get the government totally out of the health insurance business and confine it to just doling out welfare.

Similarly, let businesses cease offering insurance coverage as an employee fringe benefit. It is an historical accident that businesses have had to, at great expense, hire and provide space and equipment for armies of employees to manage insurance programs for their workers.

Here's my idea. Keep Medicare and Medicaid programs much as they are. Recognize that these are not insurance programs, but welfare - given that, on balance, no one contributes as much into those programs as one takes out. Income standards could be applied for Medicare eligibility; and standards for putting people on Medicaid should be toughened to counter abuses.

After corporations discontinue all employee health insurance benefits, they must increase all employee salaries by an amount that is equivalent to the value of those benefits. Companies could then refocus their energies to their main purposes for being.

Employees, having increased salaries, then go out and buy the kind of health insurance they want or need from insurance companies operating across state lines - just like they buy car insurance. Employees would no longer feel indentured to companies they cannot leave because they'd lose insurance benefits. Insurance would be entirely portable.

Those "gaming the system" by not buying insurance and relying on local ER's or other charity hospitals for free health care will be tracked-down and have income or assets seized to cover costs.

The small percentage that are poor, or have preconditions making them uninsurable, would be covered by welfare that could possibly be new provision of the Medicare program. Bottom line: cut government jobs and bureaucracy; more efficiency and consumer freedoms; and no one goes without health care.

Charles F. Falk

Schaumburg