The Purple Health Plan
We, the undersigned, support the following principles governing fundamental healthcare reform and endorse immediate implementation of the Purple Healthcare Plan.
Principles of Healthcare Reform
- All Americans need a basic health plan and should be free to purchase supplemental health insurance coverage.
- Healthcare should be privately provided with people free to choose their doctors and hospitals.
- All who can pay for their health plans should do so through a combination of existing tax payments and health plan co-payments.
- The government's projected healthcare costs must be strictly capped and affordable on a long-term basis.
- Health plans should be affordable regardless of one's pre-existing health conditions or risk.
- The system must provide strong incentives to prevent overuse of healthcare services and discourage bad healthcare behavior.
- Medical malpractice reform is needed to keep providers from engaging in unaffordable defensive medicine.
The Purple Health Plan
- All Americans receive a voucher each year to purchase a standard plan from the private-plan provider of their choice.
- Vouchers are individually risk-adjusted; those with higher expected healthcare costs, based on documented medical conditions, receive larger vouchers.
- Participating insurance companies providing standard plans cannot deny coverage.
- Each year a panel of doctors sets the coverages of the standard plan subject to a strict budget, namely that the total cost to the government of the vouchers cannot exceed 10 percent of GDP.
- Insurance companies providing standard plans contract with private providers to cover their plan participants.
- Americans choose doctors and hospitals included in the standard plan they choose.
- Plan providers compete and provide incentives to improve participants' health and limit bad health practices.
- Plan providers offer supplemental plans to their participants and cannot deny supplemental insurance coverage to their participants.
- The government (federal and state) ends the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance premiums.
- Like all other Americans, Medicare, Medicaid, and health exchange participants are covered by the Purple Health Plan subject to appropriate transition provisions.
- The roughly 10 percent of GDP now spent or allocated by federal and state government on these and related programs, as well as on the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance premiums, is reallocated to help finance the vouchers.