Hypocritical Oath

AB: You’re a doctor. We see a lot of doctors who go into politics, from both sides of the political divide. What can a doctor bring to lawmaking that perhaps a lawyer wouldn’t bring?

RP: Doctors, myself included, bring a perspective on the health care problems and what we should do with health care reform, and that will be an issue that has great interest to me. But I bring to that table the same arguments I would bring for every other area of the economy: capitalism works, competition works, and the reason health care’s broken is not too much capitalism, it’s too little capitalism. We could get it to work if we could bring capitalism to play.

AB: Bring capitalism to play in what way?

RP: Well, right now there’s almost no capitalism involved in health care. Capitalism involves freely fluctuating prices that consumers engage on a daily basis. Fifty percent of what I do is Medicare, the price is fixed, 5% of what I do is Medicaid, the prices are fixed. You can’t choose your doctor based on price. You can choose premiums with the insurance company, but there’s no market place. We need higher deductibles. We need multi-year insurance plans. Health insurance needs to be more like term life insurance, so there are some reforms that we could bring into it.