A New Healthcare Plan for America: An Economic Approach

This plan for restructuring the American health care system is called the Global Partnership Plan (GPP). GPP primarily addresses the critical medical challenge of the decade commencing in 201 0: the retirement of the baby boomers. At that point in time, a birth cohort in excess of 76,000,000 Americans will reach qualifying age for retirement.

The medical needs of this group of seniors will swamp a medical system that is just creaking along. Burdened as it is by excessive and inappropriate government regulation, the American health care delivery system is not really prepared to meet this challenge. The policy changes recommended by this plan are intended to help America to devise a health care system capable of accommodating the huge increase in demand for health care that is sure to occur in the near future.

The Global Partnership Plan offers a proposal for improving the federal revenue base that supports medical services spending, but not the basis on which that revenue is collected. It does not recommend any changes to the basic Medicare taxation system or private payer insurance. Instead, it proposes a new engine of growth to stimulate the global economy in order to fand the increased need for medical expenditures.

The major focus of GPP is to expand the supply of medical services by encouraging global partnerships and medical entrepreneurship. This plan seeks to rationalize medical expenditures by invoking consumer sovereignty and placing the patient in the driver seat in terms of making medical purchase decisions.

Relying upon consumer sovereignty to drive the system is consistent with the first goal of the Health Care Magna Carta. In striving to rapidly expand the available supply of medical services as an economic sector, GPP will also contribute to the achievement of Health Care Goals 2, 7, 8,9 and 10. This plan is basically a macroeconomic plan to restructure a three digit industry group as defined in the Standard Industrial Classification System. Therefore, those portions of the Health Care Magna Cart that deal with individual outcomes of patient care and specifically Health Care Goals 3,4,5,and 6 are not considered in this Plan.

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