How, then, do we get costs under control? I would propose the kind of plan that Dr. Ben Carson has championed — that we create Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for people from the day that they are born to the day that they die, at which time they can pass any money in their HSA on. We can pay for these HSAs with the same traditional dollars that we currently pay for health care. Even if the government populates everyone’s Health Savings Account — all 315,000,000 of us in the US at $2,000 a year, that’s $630 billion dollars. That’s not a whole lot compared to what we’re spending now, and everybody would have health care and you could always add more to your plan on your own. What you add on your own should be pretax and never be taxed, thus allowing everyone to save taxes and save for their heath. Your employer could add to it, anybody could add onto it; but everybody would have basic care. And that’s what we’re trying to do. If we bring it into the free market, that makes it work much better. But we also need to incorporate tort reform, and digital, electronic medical records. I would embed those records in a microchip that the patient can keep, rather than have them floating in cyberspace. I think people’s medical records are much too important and much too private to be drifting in cyberspace. Those are some of the major components of the program, and I think that could be done for considerably less money than we’re spending now.

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