Affordable Healthcare for NYS
New York needs consumer-driven healthcare reform. This means returning choices and power to consumers while driving prices down. Providers must once again have options that force the industry to compete for business. Instead of being primarily concerned with who funds, this policy is more concerned with reforming the primary healthcare markets and government-level management of the healthcare industry. Regardless of how healthcare is funded, we must have lower healthcare costs. To accomplish this, I would take the following necessary actions:
CONSUMER DRIVEN MARKETS
- Require all providers to have transparent pricing that is up front, simple, and easy to understand.
- Provide a website resource to help New Yorkers find the best and cheapest solutions for their healthcare, including price comparisons between providers. The website would be paid for by the providers.
- Make Healthcare Savings Accounts common and accessible to the masses.
- All state employees, including elected officials, should be required to compete in the healthcare market like any other citizen.
- Consumers will not pay more than insurance companies for any service.
- Put a stop to price gouging of medicines and devices that are protected from competition.
- Stand up to the federal government’s rules that cause shortages in supplies and keep lifesaving testing and treatment from consumers, in order to provide access to healthcare needs.
- Abolish Certificates of Need (CON) to allow licensed practitioners to practice and purchase supplies without permission or reporting to Albany. These CONs allow bureaucrats to artificially restrict the healthcare market by requiring their approval for competitors to open up shop. This approval is hard to get, which results in healthcare monopolies operating with limited to no competition.
- Allow medical facilities to have flexibility by eliminating mandates from privately owned cartel boards such as JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations). This will allow for increased services at a lower cost by increasing the supply of medical personnel able to work in NY.
EXPANDING CARE
We must address the overwhelming shortage of medical personnel which is driving up costs, wait times, and simultaneously degrading care. We must also expand access through the use of telehealth, lowering costs and providing care in underserved areas. To accomplish these things, I will do the following:
- Allow all medical school graduates to be licensed as physician’s assistants until the remaining requirements, such as residency, have been met to become a doctor.
- Streamline the college course requirements for medical school which will enable doctors to finish school with less debt and have an easier time starting their own practice or clinic.
- Streamline the college course requirements for nurses and class capacity should be increased to accommodate the rising demand to pursue the opportunity.
- Residency requirements should be capped at 1 year regardless of who accredits them. End the exclusion of professionally competent healthcare providers and workers and expand acceptance of residency training to graduates of all officially recognized medical programs. This will increase the supply of medical personnel in New York.
- New York will recognize all doctors who graduate from any IMED (International Medical Education Directory) recognized school as most states do and New York will opt into the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact (IMLCC). This will significantly reduce restrictions on entry into the marketplace for healthcare professionals.
- Empower nurses to do more while relieving their workload with more medical personnel. This will enhance the unique benefit nurses provide without overloading them with responsibilities better served by other medical professionals.
- All telemedicine providers are allowed to operate in New York as long as they meet requirements to practice. We must also stop requiring them to be on a list of pre-approved sites to operate. This will allow us to greatly increase our supply of telemedicine providers in NY.
- Elimination of on-site/in person assessment requirements for telemedicine providers, which are often unnecessary.
- End restrictions on house calls for licensed medical personnel.