Milton Wolf’s PatientCare: A Sensible Alternative to ObamaCare

As ObamaCare extends to government more and more control over health care, Milton Wolf—a medical doctor and candidate for U.S. Senate from Kansas—advocates “free market solutions to our healthcare problems” through a package of reforms he calls PatientCare. Wolf’s reforms would, among other things:

• Reform the tax code to give individual purchasers of health insurance the same pre-tax advantages that employer and union plans have. Because individual policies are not tied to a particular job, individuals don’t lose them when they change jobs.
• Eliminate government insurance mandates. Such mandates legally empower bureaucrats to “dictate what insurance options you must purchase [even if] you don’t want them, don’t need them or can’t afford them.” For example, the ObamaCare contraception mandate forces single men and infertile couples (among others) to spend more on their insurance premiums to fund contraception used by others.
• Eliminate interstate trade barriers for insurers and doctors. Currently, doctors and insurers can generally offer their services only in the states in which they are licensed, severely hampering competition and raising prices. “The solution is straightforward: States should open their borders and allow reciprocity for physicians and insurance carriers that are licensed in other states to practice medicine and offer more insurance products to compete for your business.”

Although Wolf stops far short of advocating a consistently free market in medicine (he would maintain, among other things, Medicare and Medicaid as well as occupational licensure for doctors), his proposals would substantially decrease government rights violations in the realm of medicine, and substantially free doctors, insurers, and patients to contract for the health-related services that best meet their needs.

Few even remotely rational alternatives have been offered by politicians or pundits as counter proposals to ObamaCare. Wolf’s is by far the best put forth by any viable U.S. political candidate.

Related:

• Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care”
• ObamaCare Supporter: “I Didn’t Realize I Would Pay for It Personally”

About Michael A. LaFerrara

Michael A. LaFerrara resides in New Jersey, where he spent his career in the plumbing, building controls, and construction industries. He writes on a wide variety of topics from an Objectivist perspective at his blog, Principled Perspectives.

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