The Jefferson Health Care Plan
All this talk about converting Medicare and Medicaid into a private funding source to purchase health care for everyone in America is surely giving some people headaches or making other people mad. It is just such a foreign concept to the entire evolution of federal government involvement in medicine since 1965.
Anytime someone or some group comes up with a 'crazy' new idea, the established orthodoxy comes at it with usual progression of attacks, as enumerated by Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
But before that ever happens, someone has to have the "new" crazy idea, don't they?
In 1994, 15 years ago, former Congressman Alex McMillan introduced the 'Jefferson Health Plan' that showed exactly how this 'crazy idea' of converting all of the federal health care programs into a pool of funds that could be allocated on an income-related basis to cover every man, woman and child in the United States with a comprehensive health insurance plan.
H. Res. 508, was a detailed, actuarial-sound plan that had been developed over a two-year timeframe with the assistance of one of the nation's foremost health care actuaries, Mr. Mark Litow of Milliman and Robertson in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Instead of trying to fix an unfixable system with bandaids on the margins, the Jefferson Plan sought to fix all of the inherent problems in health care such as covering the uninsured, lowering costs in the system and not raising any taxes in one fell swoop. It could have been called the "Gordian Knot" Health Care Plan because it had the same effect. [1]
It actually came about as an answer to a challenge in 1993 from the Ranking Member of the Budget Committee, John Kasich, who apparently got tired of Mr. McMillan constantly pointing out to the Committee that "There are already enough existing funds in the health care system to pay for everyone's insurance...the problem...
