The Medical Savings and Loan

The Medical Savings and Loan is a free market alternative to insurance. I worked for many years designing computer programs to track insurance claims and calculate premiums. I soon realized that insurance dramatically underserves the lower income people in the nation.

I then set my sights on reverse engineering an insurance pool into individually owned private accounts.

The Medical Savings and Loan starts with the same amount of money as an insurance company. The program divides the insurance pool into three pieces. The first piece goes into savings accounts held directly by policy holders. This allows people to build equity in their healthcare policy.

The second portion goes into a Loan Reserve. The Loan Reserve is owned by the savings account. This money is used to make loans for emergency and preventative medical care. Any money not loaned out goes into the savings account.

A final portion is held aside for grants.

The program creates a new position called the Health Care Advocate. The advocate replaces the insurance agents, claims adjusters and other positions in the insurance industry.

The Medical Savings and Loan uses a combination of savings accounts and loans to help people self fund their care.

The mantra of the Medical Savings and Loan is: "Those who can self-fund their care should."

The primary focus of the Medical Savings and Loan is to give people the tools to accomplish this important goal.

Each member of the program will work with the Health Care Advocate to establish a structured savings program for future expenses. The advocate will help them find health care providers and negotiate prices. The advocates will help clients secure loans for preventative and emergency care.

When a person has health care expenses that are out of line with their income, the advocate will help people secure grants.

By empowering people to self-fund their care, the Medical Savings and Loan helps restore the pricing mechanism in medicine and will help optimize the industry around the needs of the individual.

Public Policy

The Medical Savings and Loan is a program designed to help people self fund their care.

The program provides people with tools to help them understand and prepare for expenses.

Of course there are people who have health care needs that exceed their ability to pay. Only a tiny fraction of people fall into this category.

The Medical Savings and Loan holds aside a massive amount of money to be used for grants. If a million people were involved in the program, there would be several billion dollars held aside for grants.

The greatest fallacy in the health care debate is this mistaken belief that we must start with the exception (the small portion of people who can't self-fund their care) and dictate policy to the large number of people who can.