AMA touts affordable care plan

AMA touts affordable care plan

By Daniel Connolly
September 15, 2006

The American Medical Association is calling for radical changes in how health insurance is sold, pushing proposals that it says would reduce the number of uninsured Americans and slow the rise in health care costs.

Dr. J. Edward Hill, 68, the AMA's immediate past president, delivered the keynote address at the Economic Club of Memphis Thursday night, suggesting a greater role for market forces in the health care system is needed.

In an interview before his speech, he said the government should use tax breaks to give citizens money to buy health insurance. They would choose a plan that met their needs, rather than being limited to an insurance provider offered through their employer, he said. They would keep the insurance if they changed jobs.

Hill and his associates in the AMA, an influential physicians' organization, are traveling around the country to promote the concept to civic groups.

"We're one of the few with a plausible, reasonable, relatively simplistic plan that we think will work," Hill said.

He said the AMA hopes to make its proposal a top item of debate in the 2008 presidential election year.

Hill, a family doctor from Tupelo who became president of the nation's best-known medical association last year and served until June, said the health insurance system is failing.

Hill said 46.6 million Americans lacked insurance last year, a number he called a "national disgrace."

Hospitals and doctors must charge insurance companies higher rates to cover the cost of charity care for the uninsured, he said, and those costs are passed along to people who have insurance, driving up the cost of health care.

Under the AMA's plan, the poor would receive the biggest tax breaks to buy health insurance. The relatively wealthy would be required to buy insurance, a requirement that would spread to lower income levels as time passed.

Federal subsidies would help cover those whose severe illnesses would otherwise prevent them from affording premiums.

Hill says more people would have health insurance under the proposal.

He also says it would slow increases in health care costs, since people with insurance would no longer be supporting the uninsured.

The plan would be expensive for the government, but the AMA argues the government already subsidizes employer health insurance because it's not taxed as part of workers' incomes. It says the government could better use that money by shifting it to tax breaks.

Hill also spoke against any cuts in physician reimbursements from Medicare, the federal program for the elderly and disabled.

He also called for improved health education to prevent conditions such as obesity and teen pregnancy and said programs to deliver comprehensive care to pregnant women could help cut infant mortality in places like Memphis.

-- Daniel Connolly: 529-5296