Health Care Reform Proposal

• Change the individual mandate to one on businesses and corporations, requiring them to provide a health care plan to all of their full-time employees and their families earning less than $100,000 a year.

• Dramatically expand and increase the health care tax credit for those businesses to negate the additional costs to business owners and offset the economic impact of the mandate, as well as minimize the number of full-time workers that they end up dropping to part-time in order to avoid having to offer them benefits.

• Allow part-time employees and those earning over $100,000 a year to purchase health insurance across state lines, using their own expanded health care tax credits, maximizing choice and competition to provide the lowest premiums possible and customization of plans to suit the needs of individuals and their families.

• Through the Department of Education, allow college students to purchase their own inexpensive, high-deductible health care plans from the Marketplace using financial aid, which would carry forward until the age of 30 or until they are able to get coverage through a full-time employer. Repeal the requirement that plans allow children to remain on their parents’ plans until age 26.

• Make participation in some sort of group health care plan for their members a prerequisite for religious organizations to qualify to receive tax-exempt status. Allow religious organizations to have discretion over which of their members would qualify to receive these benefits, based upon adherence to moral teachings (particularly health codes), payment of tithing, or whatever other measures those organizations deem appropriate.

• Expand Medicaid to cover the disabled, the unemployed, and those who are otherwise unable to qualify for employer-sponsored insurance or afford to purchase their own (i.e., the mentally ill). Move current welfare recipients who qualify for private insurance through either their employers or the Marketplace off of the program, reserving it only for those who are truly in need.

• Abolish Medicare and allow seniors to transfer their Medicare funds to private Health Savings Accounts. Allow young people to open these accounts too and begin contributing to them at the time they begin full-time employment, tax-free.

• Allow, finally, the importation of cheaper, generic prescription drugs from Canada. Give any medication that has been cleared for use by the Canadian government a waiver on FDA approval here in the U.S., as part of a new free trade deal to replace NAFTA.

• Federally decriminalize medicinal marijuana and allow millions of Americans to use this as a cheaper, healthier, less addictive alternative to dangerous opioids and other easily-abused prescription medications. Allow individuals to purchase prescription drug plans that cover medicinal marijuana if they choose to do so.

• End the War on Drugs entirely and transfer the billions of dollars saved from drug enforcement and incarceration into health care (and education) instead. Replace drug incarceration with drug treatment through Medicaid as John Kasich did in Ohio.

• Deal effectively with illegal immigration so that the costs of illegal immigrants using ERs without health insurance and never paying for their care are eliminated.

• Close obsolete and unnecessary overseas military bases and dramatically reduce defense expenditures worldwide. Make our allies pay their fair share in NATO, and encourage Japan to make the necessary changes to its constitution to be able to defend itself in the Far East against China and North Korea. Withdraw all American military personnel stationed overseas. Use the savings from the defense budget to completely revamp the VA and provide our veterans with the care that they need and deserve, including mental health treatment to deal with PTSD and job placement programs in the private sector, which will allow them to eventually go off of Tricare and onto private insurance through their employer.

• Maintain the requirement that health insurance companies provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, but allow those companies to charge people a surcharge on their premiums if those pre-existing conditions are the result of vices and their own poor health choices, such as smoking or morbid obesity. Emphasize and encourage preventative health care as a way of further reducing costs without subsidizing bad behavior or negating personal responsibility.

• Enact tort reform and other measures that Republicans want to reduce the cost of frivolous litigation against doctors, but keep in place malpractice regulations to deal with serious issues.