Health care plans need clarity

I do not agree with Rep. Tom Price making us guess what his plan is to replace the Affordable Care Act. We should not wait until after we hire him to know his plan. If he and his colleagues had a good plan, they would have brought it forward a long time ago.

Rumored Health Care Savings plans and catastrophic (high-deductible) insurance policies offer no insurance to millions of our citizens. Anyone earning minimum wage, even two or three times minimum wage, is unable to afford to save for medical care costs and pay premiums for catastrophic insurance. Their salaries barely cover shelter, food, transportation and communications for an individual, forget about a family.

The crazy system we now have for assessing costs for medical care must be addressed. Currently the same tests or services can have widely different charges depending on the day and/or the facility. How can anyone plan to save money for medical care?

Limits must be set on the profit-taking of the pharmaceutical companies. We must have an open system of pricing for health care services and pharmaceutical to make health care work for us.

The health care of citizens with chronic illnesses is completely ignored with Congressman Price’s rumored plan.

It is time to have some transparency in health care planning. The Senate seems to be considering hiring someone who has no plan and even a limited idea of the actual health care problems we, the citizens, face.

This story was originally published February 7, 2017 at 6:45 PM with the headline "Health care plans need clarity."