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..::: NEWS RELEASE
..::: JANUARY 10, 2005
New Year's Health Care Resolutions
NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIA—The new year brings open enrollment health care hassles for
today’s employer and employee alike, claims Americans for Free Choice in
Medicine (AFCM), though help is on the way.
"During the annual cattle call, employees are
pummeled with bureaucratic health care jargon about co-pays,
deductibles, and out-of-pocket maximums,” writes Scott Holleran, editor
of AFCM’s newsletter, Pulse. “Open enrollment in a health plan
gets more confusing—and, for everyone, more expensive—each year.”
Holleran explains that HMOs and PPOs were essentially
instituted by the government through Sen. Ted Kennedy’s and President
Richard Nixon’s HMO Act in 1973. “Since the HMO Act was passed, the
individual has become a prisoner—covered by an employer, herded into
managed care and locked into rising co-pays and lower quality
treatments,” he says. “It’s money for practically nothing.”
AFCM insists there is an alternative and it may be
coming soon to the rescue: insurance compatible with Health Savings
Accounts (HSAs).
“Imagine medicine without networks, percentages, and
thresholds,” Holleran suggests, “without co-pays, generics and
pre-authorization from a nurse practitioner at a phone bank in
Idaho—that’s the best of the Health Savings Account plans: free choice
of treatment, 100 percent of costs above the deductible, real,
name-brand drugs and less restrictions on medicine, that plus
tax-deductible contributions which earn as much as four percent
interest.”
Holleran’s articles about health policy have been
published in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit News and the Silicon Valley
Business Journal.
Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, (AFCM), was
founded in 1993. AFCM educates the public about the principles of
socialized medicine and free market ideas, such as HSAs and tax reform,
and publishes a consumer's guide on its Web site (http://www.afcm.org).
AFCM is the nation's only educational organization based on individual
rights, personal responsibility and free market ideas in medicine.
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Copyright © 2005 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
For reprint permission, contact AFCM.
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