Tarrant touts health plan; Sanders gets firefighters' backing
COLCHESTER, Vt. --Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Tarrant released a health care white paper on Thursday that called for streamlining medical information and reducing regulation of the health insurance industry.
The retired founder and CEO of IDX Systems, a medical information technology company, Tarrant said he would bring his experience working with IDX clients in the United States, Canada and Great Britain to his work to improve America's health care system.
"I am committed to using my 35 years of experience in health care to be an initiator of substantial change," Tarrant says near the beginning of his 24-page paper. "I strongly advocate and will promote bold but accountable ideas that build on the strengths of the present health care system while reforming its weaknesses."
While Tarrant laid out his health care plan in a series of media interviews, his main rival for Vermont's open Senate seat, independent Rep. Bernard Sanders, basked Thursday in the glow of an endorsement from two firefighters' unions.
The Professional Firefighters of Vermont, which represents 275 firefighters at 11 city and town fire departments around Vermont, praised Sanders for his work in security funding for equipment and training. The International Association of Firefighters also endorsed Sanders.
Sanders criticized President Bush for his proposed cut of nearly 50 percent in funding for one program of federal aid to local first responders and elimination of another.
On health care, Tarrant said in an interview that his plan remained a work in progress. "This is a paper, it's not a final plan. It's a living document. It's conceptual."
But in broad outline, Tarrant's plan does not call for any sweeping reforms of the current health care system, as advocates of a single-payer system would support.
A key component calls for expanding Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors, to allow those currently without insurance to buy in, paying premiums based on their income. Tarrant would also allow farmers and small businesses to buy in, and would eventually absorb Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health coverage to low-income Americans. All told, Tarrant estimated that his expanded Medicare program would cover about half of all Americans.
That would lessen the "cost-shift," in which health care providers recoup their costs of caring for people who don't have health insurance and can't afford to pay by increasing charges to private insurers, Tarrant said. Less regulation of the private health insurance market would enable companies to offer a broader range of insurance products, he added.
Tarrant said he also would push for streamlining the handling of health care information. Patient charts, or medical records would be kept by insurance companies, rather than at the doctor's office, with doctors having access to those records electronically. He said this would reduce medication errors and duplicative tests sometimes ordered by different doctors. In Tarrant's vision, the doctor would download the patient's medical record, update it to reflect the treatment being rendered and "be paid within 24 hours."
