Bob Flanders on Health Care

Supports HSAs, cross-state insurance, and tort reform

• Allow people to buy coverage across state lines, thereby increasing competition & breaking up health care monopolies.
• Require pricing transparency for the costs of radiologic and other diagnostic procedures.
• Permit trade and other industry and business associations to provide less costly health care plans to their members.
• Encourage the use of health care savings accounts.
• Enact medical malpractice reforms.
• While these reforms will help restore affordability, all plans must cover pre-existing conditions
• Medicaid expansion will place stress on overburdened state budgets. This problem can be mitigated if states are given the flexibility to more efficiently serve Medicaid recipients.

Drugs Affordability Act: negotiate Medicare drug prices

• Control prescription drug price increases by creating an enforcement mechanism to identify drugs that have unreasonable price increases and impose penalties on their manufacturers.
• Permit Medicare Part D to negotiate drug prices to leverage federal purchasing power, crack down on price gouging, and restrain the growth in prescription prices with justification required for substantial price increases.
• Require transparency in drug pricing by requiring manufacturers to publicly disclose significant price increases, e.g., over 100% annually.