Rand Paul puts forth the best health care plan yet!!

If we are not going to change the pricing model as I hoped then we should adopt the Paul plan---the best plan from republicans I have seen.

LINK

Here is why I think it is cool:

1) It makes health insurance premiums tax deductible for individuals BUT it does not remove the tax deduction for the employer cost of health care which Rudy floated yesterday and I liked. It will accomplish a lot of the same benefit of producing more shoppers and there will be plenty of incentives for employees to want their own insurance instead of their employers BECAUSE it also includes a $5000 tax credit for employees to fund health savings accounts----THIS IS GREAT. You could buy $20 or even $25000 deductible policies one day if you can pile up a big savings account.

2) it protects people with existing aliments

3) it allows people to pool together to buy insurance---even though group insurance is mostly higher per person than individual I assume one of the disadvantages of groups will disappear with private pools. That disadvantage that drives up group cost is that groups have unknown risk as employers can hire very bad risk and the group has to take it. These pools can not exclude members that are a part of their group--say members of their church if the church forms a pool--but they will not be employers so they can limit the membership of their pool to those on a particular day or a particular point of time. This removes a lot of risk for insurance.

4) Allows states to change medicaid without federal oversight. (The very first thing Louisiana ought to do is the end of emergency room visits often used instead of office visits for minor illnesses.)

5) restricts state regulation of interstate insurers making more companies available to consumers.