Healthcare

Accessing affordable, high-quality healthcare is a challenge for many South Carolina families. Since coming to Congress, I have strongly supported legislation to help control the rising costs of medical care, and ensure that American families live healthy and happy lives.

In November 2003, Congress acted decisively to improve the affordability of and accessibility to quality healthcare in our country by passing the Medicare Modernization Act, which provided the most comprehensive reforms to the Medicare Program since its inception in 1965. By creating a prescription drug benefit for Medicare beneficiaries, we modernized Medicare to ensure that it meets the needs of today’s seniors.

I currently support several innovative initiatives which help address many of the challenges facing healthcare in our country:

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs): Americans who set up Health Savings Accounts along with the purchase of a low-cost, high-deductible healthcare plan can save money tax-free to pay routine medical expenses and future healthcare costs. HSAs are also crucial because they are portable. When Americans change jobs, many insurance plans do not shift to the new position. HSAs move with you allowing for more worker flexibility.
Association Health Plans (AHPs): AHPs enable small employers and others to provide better and more affordable healthcare coverage options for their employees, like those that many large employers and labor unions can offer. AHPs would allow bona-fide business or professional associations and other groups that have existed for at least three years for purposes other than providing health benefits, to pool their members together to purchase health coverage. AHPs will make health coverage more accessible and affordable by creating a level playing field for small businesses through greater bargaining power and administrative efficiencies. By grouping small employers together to purchase coverage, AHPs will be able to act more like large employers and labor unions and offer lower cost coverage to employers, employees and their families.
Medical Liability Reform: Because of excessive litigation and enormous payouts, the cost of liability insurance has risen more than 10 percent in recent years. Common-sense reforms to medical liability law that still protect patients will increase access to quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans, while reducing frivolous and time-consuming legal proceedings against doctors, nurses, hospitals, and other healthcare providers. Unchecked lawsuits drive good providers out of local communities across the country and raise healthcare costs for all Americans.
Promoting Competition: Greater competition in our healthcare industry would lower prices and produce a better product for American families. Unfortunately, there are a number of impediments that stand in the way of strong competition and more opportunities for the patient and the physician. One place we can address this problem is in the sale of health insurance across state lines. I am proud to support legislation – such as H.R. 4460, the Health Care Choice Act – which would remove the unnecessary obstacles that stand in the way of allowing Americans to review and purchase insurance policies outside of their own state.
Healthcare Information Technology: Hospitals and clinics deal with millions of individual healthcare records. This personal information needs to be protected but it also needs to be accessible to your physicians. Increased use of technology in the collection and maintenance of medical records will help reduce costs and the possibility for mistakes that occur when physicians do not have access to the necessary information.

These are all steps we can take as part of a larger effort to make our nation’s healthcare a patient-focused and flexible system that is more affordable for every American.

For more information, I encourage you to visit the Department of Health and Human Services website.