LETTERS: MEDICAL SAVINGS PLAN

To the editor:

I guess the big HMO lobby, with its billions of dollars, has spoken, and Congress has leaped. With the passage of the Kennedy-Kassebaum health bill, we have taken a huge leap toward to socialized medicine that Clinton tried to pass in 1994. Now it is being done a piece at a time hoping to fool the American people, who fought so hard to stop it in the first place.

This bill is currently in conference committee. The biggest problem with this is that Ted Kennedy is in charge of the conference committee, and he wants to kill the House version because it offers Americans a choice. His buddies, the HMO lobbyists, definitely don't want the American people to have a choice, because they know that most Americans will choose the freedom of a medical savings account rather than the subservience of HMOs. With an MSA, you choose your doctor or specialist and what treatment you want. With an HMO, the gatekeeper decides your doctor or if you even need to see a specialist or if you will be allowed treatment. Actually, these gatekeepers receive bonuses for denying medical treatment and thereby saving the HMO money.

Medical savings accounts are really quite simply and could help bring medical costs down. With an individual or business setting up and MSA, you would have money readily available for incidental trips to the doctor, glasses, prescriptions and other things not usually covered by insurance, and you could purchase a high-deductible insurance to cover major problems for a lot less. Because the money in the savings account is yours, it goes with you if you change jobs. It also causes consumer discipline and accountability and will provide incentives to save. According to Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, MSAs could cut health-care costs in half.

This Kennedy-Kassebaum bill has a lot of the same new health-care crimes provisions that doctors so adamantly fought in Hillary Clinton's plan. The effect of creating these health-care crimes will be to drive physicians in private practice out of business. It will be unsafe for any doctor in private practice to bill a patient for any test or treatment, knowing that some bureaucrat may decide later that the procedure was not medically necessary and, therefore, is criminal fraud. HMOs already have solved that problem by giving financial incentives to the gatekeepers who decide what's best for you.

Call your senators and representatives. Tell them you support medical savings account legislation to change federal tax law so that individual self-insurance is treated the same as HMO insurance. Anyone who wants to stay in an HMO can do so. No one would be forced to set up and MSA account. On the other hand, individuals should be able to set up an MSA with the same tax treatment as HMOs. We want options, not requirements.

VERONICA HUNT

West Plains