Somewhere across the country, a Hillary staffer is having a breakdown ... private healthcare offered directly from doctors?

This is going backwards for the universal healthcare nuts. We need more government, not less! But now we have this program in Rhode Island called HealthAccessRI. You pay $30 for a "membership" in a primary care doctor's practice and you get 24-hour telephone access, sick visits, well child care, check-ups, school and sports physicals, family planning and yearly physicals. Each office visit is just $10.

Thirty dollars! That's less than a cell phone bill or one tank of gas. Now this is not an insurance program – and politicians are already quick to point that out – but it offers an affordable solution for primary care. And it didn't take government to do it! All it took was a group of doctors. The private sector! There are now 21 participating doctors, brought together by Michael D. Fine who is taking the program statewide. The government's reaction? Christopher F. Koller is the state's health insurance commissioner. He referred to the program as "an interesting experiment."

Then he warns about the horrible fact that this is not insurance. No. It is not. And it never claims to be. But for all of the 120,000 uninsured Rhode Island residents ... let's just take a minute to imagine if every single one of these 120,000 uninsured residents suddenly applied for government healthcare. Imagine the taxpayer money it would take to service those people in an inefficient government system.

Now imagine if those people paid $30 to have a primary care doctor. That's almost $4 million floating around the Rhode Island economy. More demand. More people get jobs. Isn't that just amazing?

The health commissioner is upset because he thinks people are going to drop their insurance and choose this alternative. That is the people's choice to make, although power-hungry politicians don't want that.

Neal Boortz, Nealz Nuze

January 18, 2008

Here is a link to the HealthAccessRI web site.

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