With an MSA, patients are free to consult doctors and specialists of their choice. They can negotiate their own cash discounts, with or without the assistance of an MSA administrator. Doctors are paid at the time of service, without costly administration. Patients control the medical decisions with their doctors’ advice, without third party intervention.
This is a refreshing contrast to the many mechanisms used today to attempt to reduce medical care spending through restrictive access to physicians, specialists, and treatments as well as unnecessary administrative and regulatory expenditures.
The difference stems from a fundamentally different philosophy. The MSA is developed from the basic premise that an individual has the right to freedom of choice.
Principles of Our Founding Fathers
The Declaration of Independence holds the truth to be “self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…” The tyrannies of the British Government, including the charge that the King of Great Britain “has erected a Multitude of New Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People and eat out their Substance,” could be held in direct comparison to the growing health care bureaucracy with similar tyrannies suffered at the hands of the very government our forefathers had established to protect us from.
The ideas that founded this country are being subverted or ignored and this has resulted in many of the problems in health care. Americans for Free Choice in Medicine (AFCM) has been established in the commitment to educate about the important role that ideas play in producing results.
Ideas have consequences and the wrong ideas produce wrong action and bad consequences. The history of health care financing bears this out.
What Does “Freedom” Mean?
Individual liberty is the freedom to act. It means your right to take the actions necessary to advance your life and pursue your happiness. It is not a liberty to take the things you want or need from others by force. With liberty comes corresponding responsibility. The individual and no one else is responsible for the actions necessary to sustain his life and pursue his happiness.
One’s right to pursue happiness is not a claim on others to provide. When something is needed to sustain life, it must be obtained through voluntary cooperation, without force otherwise someone else’s liberty is destroyed. This voluntary cooperation is called trading, market exchange, or, more accurately, Capitalism.
Individual liberty, personal responsibility and voluntary exchange of goods and services are the founding principles of this country. They are the sound ideas by which to base our actions and to understand any reforms being contemplated by the government.
The Portability of Health Insurance
Many health care today advocates look at lack of portability of healthcare insurance and identify that as the problem. In fact, portability is simply a benefit feature not usually present in employer policies. Lack of portability is a symptom of a more fundamental problem–namely a tax incentive that has discouraged personal responsibility.
To be continued…
Americans for Free Choice in Medicine (AFCM) is a national non-profit, non-partisan educational organization. AFCM promotes the philosophy of individual rights, personal responsibility and free market economics in the health care industry. AFCM advocates a full, free market health care system by promoting medical savings accounts (MSAs), tax equity for the individual, and AFCM teaches the history of HMOs, which were instituted by a long, incremental process of government intervention.
