President Obama has argued that the health care system needs reform in order to lower costs, but Fox Business Network found one doctor who has already cut costs by more than half without government intervention.
Dr. Kent Holtorf of the Holtorf Medical Group told FBN anchor Alexis Glick that his practice, which does not take insurance, has “cut costs 70 percent.”
In his view, “the whole insurance model is broken. So people want change but they don’t want government change. They don’t want to make the problem worse.”
“All major laboratories will take 70 percent less, every doctor will take 70 percent less, and hospitals 70 percent less in procedures if they cut out the insurer,” Holtorf explained. “So medical savings plans are great except they have one fatal flaw – there was no negotiated rates. So patients would – they’d have their cash, they’d have uh, basically empowered to you know compete with doctors, compete with care, but they’d pay five times as much.”
Holtorf did advocate one government action saying, “all the government needs to do is step in and say doctors need to post their rates, hospitals, labs and cash has to be cheapest and there you go. You’re gonna fix most of the health care problems in this country … we need catastrophic [insurance] but that’s it.”
Ultimately Holtorf’s solution was “to go back to competition” between physicians, not insurance companies.
Suggestions like Holtorf’s have been rare in media reports about health care reform. A recent Special Report from the Business & Media Institute found that network stories on health care favored ObamaCare in several ways: proponents outnumbered critics (243 to 104), complaints about the trillion or higher cost were only mentioned 9 percent of the time, and reporters failed to point out that one public insurance program (Medicare) is heading toward an “explosive fiscal situation.”
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