By STEVE ZECOLA

Americans spend about $3 trillion per year on healthcare, or about $10,000 per person per year. Despite these expenditures, Americans are worse off than their international counterparts with respect to infant mortality, life expectancy and the prevalence of chronic conditions.

In policy debates, Republicans mostly prefer to let the marketplace devise the appropriate outcomes, but this approach ignores the market failures that plague the industry.

On the other hand, Democrats propose a variety of solutions such as “Medicare for All” which nationalizes all healthcare insurance or, as a variant, “Medicare as an Option for All” which further extends the federal government into the provision of healthcare insurance. Such approaches could actually result in a less efficient outcome, or worse yet, create a market beset by political ping pong when Administrations change.

This paper proposes a new standards-based approach for fixing the inefficiencies plaguing the healthcare industry in the United States. As described herein, a non-profit standards body would be established by Congress to bring a coordinated approach to healthcare for each of the top ten chronic diseases.

Such an approach would establish consistent priorities and practices across all of the components of the healthcare industry affecting these chronic diseases, including standards of care, areas of research emphasis and insurance guidelines.

Under such an industry structure, patient care would improve and the overall costs for the provision of healthcare would drop significantly.