I would like to offer up a stupid idea for everyone to take some potshots at.  I was thinking about health care, and H asked me about the public option.  I think that the public option would be great if it were done differently from what is being kicked around.   One of the most controversial ideas is the public option.  One of the biggest problems is that the bills kicked around cannot madate preventive care.  They can't make people get it.

How about a public option for a category of care?  Say, for preventive care.  Everybody would be entitled to preventive care, supposedly the cheapest care and the most beneficial to our health, never mind the cost of medicine.  I would like to see a government option to keep us well.  That would be worth my tax money.  Then insurance companies could offer us two types of policies....emergency and catastrophic.  They could also offer plans for preventive care, which would have some merit like quality controls, more extensive prevention, option for bundling with emergency and catastrophic care.  Paying for a 3rd party preventive plan would equal a tax credit, and flex pay would be alive and well to help pay down the cost of emergency care and catastrophic care.   I think that those three would cover pretty much every medical procedure on the planet (except homeopathy and naturopathy, but that's another day.)  This would not replace medicaid or medicare, or programs for children, except where they overlap.  Say if a senior is getting a mammogram, or a child is getting checked for scoliosis.

With the catastrophic cost going down from better preventive care (which would no doubt equal a discount from our saavy insurance companies) the insurance companies could no doubt provide their services at a reduced cost, some of which would be passed on to us, some of which would inevitably go into their pockets.  That discount for the other two insurance premiums is the incentive to get people off the couch and into the doctor's office for a checkup.  Insurance companies are doing this RIGHT NOW, but instead of using a trained doctor's opinion, are using crappy metrics like BMI.  I would have to pay extra on my insurance because my BMI is too high, even though I am far from overweight, never mind obese.  The BMI has too many problems for me to list here, so hopefully you already know how badly it sucks.

Better yet, preventive care could be administrated by the states, who at least seem to have some idea of what "BUDGET" really means.  Except California.

If people didn't want to take advantage of the public option for prevention, they would likely be charged more for the other two policies by the companies, but hell, they're doing that anyway.  

I'm not a doctor here, but I'm thinking that if most of the preventive treatments don't cost as much as other treatments, then they probably don't require the extensive knowledge that other procedures cost, either.  Not to say that I want undereducated doctors by any stretch of the imagination, but I wonder if the education could be streamlined, so to speak?  This might make preventive doctors cheaper to train, and make it possible to train them much faster, resulting in a better payoff for the amount of time in school. 

If the congress can claim to be deficit neutral with the plan they have, couldn't there be a way to make this work?  Then the government could avoid getting any more wrapped up in health care than it already is.  Of course, the government would have to regulate it by the by, define which procedures went in which category, set limits on who the insurance companies could turn down, etc, but it's all the things they're planning on regulating anyway.

Alright all, find the holes and tell me why this won't work, or I'm sending it to my congressman!!!