EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The need for creating a basic health care system that provides all American citizens with the means to pay for basic health care services is immediate and a moral imperative. All of the requisite elements are readily available. The United States of America has the highest quality and most innovative health care delivery system in the world. We also have a first rate health insurance industry which is well capitalized, efficiently organized and experienced in the administration of health care benefits. With these foundational elements available a simple plan that minimizes government intervention, streamlines regulations and provides access to medical care for all American citizens can be a reality.

The American Health Care System that is described in this proposal envisions a course of action that includes the basic elements necessary to quickly create change in a hodge podge of systems that excludes many millions of U.S. citizens and has become hopelessly bogged down in bureaucracy.

The American Health Care System proposes that every citizen of the United States of America will have basic health care coverage. This plan has as its core a new social contract that requires that the government, employers, social agencies and the individual U.S. citizen share the responsibility for universal health care coverage. Each person will be encouraged, through incentives, to assume more responsibility for his'her health status and healthy life style.

A Federal agency will be established under the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury to have ultimate authority and responsibility for the management and operation of the American Health Care System. The role of Government in this system is designated as money management, oversight, administration of eligibility records, mediation and enforcement State Insurance Commissioners will verify the eligibility of health care plans to participate in the American Health Care System, will approve the health care benefit designs submitted by the health care carriers and service areas requested and will monitor utilization rates to assure that the benefit levels offered by each plan result in at least 80% of premium being paid out for medical care claims.

Benefit design and definition as well as claims administration will be managed by each health care plan that is authorized to participate in the American Health Care System.

This proposal starts with the solid foundation of the world's foremost health care delivery system and an experienced health insurance industry and enables them to cooperate in a new health care system that provides every U.S. citizen with a means of paying for basic health care.

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