High Quality Health Care for All

Most of the discussion of controlling health care, Medicare, and Medicaid costs focuses on reducing benefits, or artificially capping payments. Neither of these approaches addresses the need for quality health care for all Americans.

One problem with the current health care system is that medical professionals generally are paid for “piece work,” for example, by the operation. This encourages both long hours and higher volume activity, neither of which improves the quality of service. We need a new paradigm.

Medical professionals should be salaried, with comfortable pay rates. Their work loads and hours should be cut as well. A new group of medical professionals should be recruited and trained, to make up for the reduced work loads. The government should pay for their medical education, under contracts which require one year of public service work, for each year of training.

By substantially increasing the number of medical professionals, we could reach the goal of high quality health care for every American.