User:InpoliticTruth/Municipal Medical Departments

= Municipal Medical Departments = In his Popular Capitalist View column in the Johnsonville Press, populist commentator Carl Peter Klapper has advocated municipal medical departments as an alternative to both public and private medical insurance. Pointing out that there has never been a true market for medical services, with doctors offering their services and patients bidding on them, and that, instead of a market, the closer analogy is to preventative and emergency services provided by police and fire departments, Mr. Klapper has argued for a more natural model of delivering medical services that is more responsive to individual and community needs while avoiding the fabricated and inflated cost structure created by insurance. The municipal medical departments could be funded through a variety of means, including municipal currencies, but a more federal approach would be for the states to establish wage scales for municipal workers and to pay them as state civil servants who are hired and managed locally, with the federal government providing funding for federally mandated municipal services and the municipalities reimbursing the state for staff hired beyond the federal and state mandates. In addition, Mr. Klapper proposes that local, county and state educational institutions provide free medical education and certification to aid in the entry-level staffing of the municipal medical departments, while returning to the earlier continuing education model of hospital-based specialized training. That is, every hospital in a municipal medical department would be a teaching hospital. Thus, municipal medical departments would drastically reduce the costs of medical instruction, while ensuring the continued training of doctors and nurses throughout their careers. Pharmaceutical education and research would also be returned to the public education system, with only drug manufacturing remaining with the pharmaceutical industry. Each municipal medical department would run its own pharmacy with drugs available at state-negotiated prices from intrastate drug manufacturers. Municipal medical departments would remain free to provide locally-favored alternative treatments, medicines and services such as house calls. Indeed, because of their local basis, municipal medical departments would be capable of much broader and more complete health care reform than any national system.