My Medical Care, Wellness & Research for All Plan

•You will never pay another premium or deductible if you don’t want to (not sure why you would want to)
• You will never be excluded from coverage for pre-existing conditions
• You will never be dropped from coverage at any age or for any reason
• You will be well-compensated and proud to be a medical professional or researcher and medical school costs will be greatly lowered as well as malpractice insurance costs
• You will benefit from billions of dollars into serious research in all fields including: cancer, diabetes, asthma, autoimmune diseases, nutrition, natural remedies, new forms of antibiotics and antivirals and safe vaccines
• You will benefit from billions of dollars to eliminate carcinogens from our water, air and food supplies
• Government will partner with medical schools, laboratories, pharmaceutical to find low cost means of producing all medicines and treatments
• You will be supported in efforts to quit smoking, stay away from addiction and get off of long-term medications whenever possible
• You won’t be subjected to unnecessary tests or be discouraged from needed ones
• You will be supported from childhood in building healthy habits, eating better foods and getting exercise
• Mental Health will be 100% on par with physical health
• AI will be used to help diagnose and find problems earlier and help in shared decision making with clinicians
• Telemedicine will bring better care to remote areas and to less mobile patients
• You will never have to fill in another form at a doctor’s office because your medical records will by encrypted in a Block Chain and fully in Your control, including any and all genetic records
• Mobile clinics will be state-of-the-art and there will be more of them
• You can buy supplemental insurance to pay for travel to hospitals, temporary housing and various medical-related expenses
• Women, men and girls and boys will have full reproductive rights and access to birth control
• Eye Care and Dental would be treated mostly on par with Medical Care
• There will be no limits on therapeutic research into marijuana, psilocybin, ketamine, DMT, ayhuasca and MMDA
• We will search the world for remedies, recipes, news and information and make it available to all
• Our mission will be to eliminate every major disease and reduce our costs down to treating accidents and helping people age gracefully
• We will have a Department of Personal Security which will oversee Consumer Protections, Medical Coverage and Research, Privacy Protection, Hardship Security and Retirement Security (The “Homeland” isn’t the only security we need)
• Veterinary services could eventually be included in the Medical System or as a supplemental program you could opt into
• It will pay for itself many times over and more so as time goes by, being most expensive at first

I don’t believe that the cost of such programs will be more than what we already spend foolishly and wastefully. In fact, I think there will be a downward pressure on cost that will cause it to steadily reduce rather than rise. This is primarily a rejiggering of the spend points and budget priorities we make for ourselves. If someone raises your taxes $100 and eliminates $200 of out of pocket costs, you enjoy a net gain of $100. But even if we ended up paying a bit more in the beginning it would be worth it to get to the next cost reduction plateau when the system would start reaping huge benefits.

Another thing that is often left out of the Medical Cost picture is The Future. Most discussions presume a sort of endless status quo. In fact the future will bring so many advances, including new treatments, cures and Artificial Intelligent systems to aid in diagnosis and recommendations, a sort of Web MD on steroids. Apps and Digital Medicine and all manner of compact devices will catch issues much sooner. Instead of expensive blood tests, a small device could take a small sample of blood and tell you all sorts of things immediately. We can barely imagine the possibilities in 10 years, let alone 50. This Golden Age of Medicine need not be more expensive. Look at computers. For around the same price they have doubled in power every 18 months or so. The same can happen in medicine, except instead of playing games faster, you will be cured and no longer in need of treatment. Nothing is less costly than not needing treatment. Look at Hep C, for all intents and purposes it has been cured. After you are cured, all the side effects of low energy, expensive maintenance, liver transplants, etc. go away, freeing up resources for other diseases. The effect will snowball and one disease will fall after another.

We have a Department of Homeland Security that was put in place after 9–11. It is an umbrella department for all things protecting the homeland such as TSA, Border Patrol, etc. I propose we spend at least as much protecting individuals with a Department of Personal Security. Likewise we can roll some existing departments and functions into this including: Consumer Protections, Medicare, Medicaid (these will be replaced with the above), Welfare and Social Security and add some additional modern touches such as Privacy Protection and Block Chain encryption of All personal data. Gone will be the days when we trust corporations with our data that they often repackage and sell and use to target us with endless spam and ads. When entities want access to your block chain they will have to make a certified request with a specific key to gain temporary access of needed data only.

Furthermore, modernization of data systems can add great efficiencies so that all of these functions can be managed with no more trouble than a modern business keeps its books and oversees inventories, payrolls, etc. Much of today’s costs are due to waste and inefficiency and centralizing certain things will greatly reduce this.

Animal Care can be expensive and yet we often think of our furry friends as part of the family. A certain amount of research should also go into improving the lives of animals and curing their diseases as well. While it might be asking too much for society at large to support this, I see nothing wrong with creating a Public Option for low cost veterinary care. Pets are not going away.

Now one of my most outrageous ideas is to set the mission to Eliminate All Diseases. That’s a tall order, I know but it’s only a mission and so eliminating one disease such as Polio or Hep C is progress toward that goal. As diseases are cured, resources are freed up to attack other, perhaps less common diseases and eventually, with a little luck, there will be few diseases we can’t conquer.

Of course none of this addresses an underlying ethical issue: What do we do with so many healthy people living so long? Will population spiral out of control? Will we have mandatory limits on numbers of children allowed? This can become a very tricky topic, especially if life expectancy soars above 100 and higher. Something will need to be done to keep it under control. Perhaps it’s the last step before we start to create space habitats and expand into the unending vastness of outer space. We already have a semi-permanent space station in continuous use so it’s not a stretch to see this expand and become common place. Regardless of how we decide to deal with our success as a species, we should try our best to move on from the present somewhat primitive approach we have to personal security and well-being and improve the lives of millions, if not billions of people (and animals).