Republicans and Democrats alike are able to recognize that health care premiums are just too high and health insurance is unattainable for many. They agree on the problem, yet disagree on the solution. But the public is being fooled regardless because neither solution actually makes health care more affordable, so far the debate has been centered around health insurance.

I would like to throw a crazy idea out there: What if health insurance was not even necessary for most people to pay for their healthcare?

Now let’s talk about the difference between these two terms. Health insurance provides compensation for health care through an agreement for an individual to pay a certain rate to remain covered. In health insurance, an individual must pay into the fund regardless of their usage of healthcare, which is simply the physical service of an improvement to your physical or mental health. While these two things interlock, they are not interchangeable.

Our current solution to what is being called a “healthcare crisis” is to force everyone to acquire insurance for essentially everything. Individuals who cannot get pregnant must pay into coverage for their prenatal care and people without prostates are required to sign up for insurance that covers prostate exams and cancer. An overall blanket solution to the “crisis” is just not working. People are paying for things they do not need and that has caused many people to pay more for their health insurance.

But what if we focused instead on the cost of actual healthcare? With cheaper, more affordable healthcare, the need for the acquisition of health insurance would decrease significantly. However, healthcare will never truly be free and some procedures will still be expensive due to the ever changing world of science. But what if we only had to purchase health insurance to cover those big things in our lives? If we were able to lower the cost of most standard medication and doctor’s visits then suddenly we would have more money to invest in health insurance coverage for the big things.

To do this, we need to do three things:

1. Stop taxing the healthcare industry.

Taxation does two things, economically speaking. First, it makes things more expensive. Taxation can be thought of as a surcharge for a product that goes to fund the government. This charge must be paid by someone — either the consumer or the seller (or in this case a physician, pharmacist, et cetera). Now, before you say “the physician should just pay the fee. It is immoral for their goal to be to make money off of someone who is ill anyway” consider the following two things: why is it moral for the government to be making money off of the ill, then? Also, who pays that tax is not arbitrarily decided. In fact, nothing in economics is arbitrary. Not the price, the quantity, the competition… nothing.

If healthcare providers could wave a wand and make their price go down and quantity go up, they would. However, these things are controlled by economics. The reason healthcare providers do not cover the taxes is called “elasticity”. The elasticity of a product or service determines if the consumer pays, the seller pays, or if they split the bill somewhere down the middle. Elasticity is the economic term for how much a consumer wants a product for its price. For example, a consumer will want open heart surgery no matter how much the price for it increases (we call this inelastic demand), but if the price of a stuffed bear increases by $100 most rational consumers will not want that bear (we call this elastic demand). Basically, healthcare is inelastic, consumers will pay for it no matter how high the price gets. Inelastic goods have the consumer paying more of the tax than the producers and sellers. Typically, however, the producers will still pay some degree of the tax. This is, though, how the price of products increase when we tax them.

Now the second thing taxation does is generates less product. In fact, if we have “too much of something bad” an economic solution is to tax it, creating less quantity. The reason for this is that if it costs more to produce a product, the company will have to produce less of it to continue to afford to operate. In this case, it means medication becomes more scarce, hospitals can not grow beyond a certain size, and often times small practices will not be able to operate at all. With less health care, we simply cannot have everyone receiving services. If we have 100 people that need health care, and due to taxation only 75 of said healthcare services can afford to be produced, then 25 people will go without care, which isn’t ideal.

Basically eliminating taxes on the healthcare industry lowers costs and increases quantity.

2. Abolish the FDA.

“But who will keep big companies in check?” You. The consumer.

Recently, there has been a public outcry against Big Pharma companies who push expensive drugs onto the consumer. Many in the public have made claims that they set their price ridiculously high to make a profit off of the drugs and people’s illness.

However, as previously established, that is simply not the case. Big companies do not have the ability to arbitrarily assign a price, only the market can do that. The market is controlled by supply and demand of the given drug. In this case, the supply of most medications is extremely low because there are only one or two providers. This causes a natural monopoly on the product.

How do we get rid of this monopoly? We allow other drug companies to make sales, increasing the quantity in the market and therefore lowering the cost. Currently, the government prevents many companies from selling their drugs to the public. They do this through the Food and Drug Administration, also known as the FDA.

The slow working bureaucracy often takes far too long to approve new life-saving drugs or old drugs that are already on the market, but with a new twist that could increase the supply. Patents on drugs have also created a smaller marketplace and given monopolies to companies.

Eliminating the FDA and minimizing unnecessary regulation can lower drug prices and increase quantity. Regulations set forth by the FDA often create a hefty toll on businesses to comply to. While big drug developers are able to comply to this without much problem, it is often too expensive for new, smaller drug companies to enter the American market because they simply can not afford the cost of the regulations. Without these new companies, the number of drugs supplied to the public is low, and therefore the price is high.

“Why don’t we just keep the FDA and make a law saying the companies have to sell the drug for cheap?”

Good question. The answer is scarcity. What is being suggested is a price ceiling, meaning the price of the drug can not go beyond a specified dollar amount. This causes a shortage of the product because the company is not making enough money to meet the demand.

The only way to solve this problem is to eliminate government involvement.

3. Tort reform.

How much can you make off of a medical malpractice lawsuit? A lot. Typically the courts award victims of medical malpractice large amounts of money to compensate for things such as physical disability, emotional trauma, and the opportunity cost of work. The physician or hospital then must pay the individual the amount owed. The problem is that courts often overestimate this amount. The question that is most frequently asked is: how do you transfer emotional trauma from medical malpractice into a dollar amount? Followed quickly by: how do you accurately determine how much an individual will be losing from wages due to medical malpractice?

In an effort to avoid paying extraneous fees in the event of a mistake, physicians must purchase liability insurance for medical malpractice. Since individuals are often awarded large sums of money in lawsuits, this insurance does not come cheap. Physicians must afford these bills to stay in practice. To determine the price of their services, physicians must evaluate their cost to operate. One of the most expensive costs is this insurance. Therefore, the cost to purchase their service must cover this.

If a doctor did not need to pay so much for their insurance, their cost for their services would not be so high. Again, this is another example of supply and demand.

The solution is tort reform — or a change in the system that causes all of this. There have been many different solutions suggested by different sides, but the conversation on this topic always dies. Until we start discussing medical malpractice lawsuits, we will bear the consequences of them.

Overall, healthcare can be cheaper, but most of the time it is the government that causes this industry to be so pricey to consumers. The only real solution is to get the government out of the industry so it can grow in quantity and plummet in price.