Mailbag:

Readers have made the point that critics of Obama’s health-care reforms should offer an alternate or better plan.

While you may not want to read the entire 1,018 pages of House Resolution 3200 — perhaps this condensed version of an alternate plan might be more palatable.

For clarification, this writer is a retired physician and makes zero income from medical practice.

Let’s support reforms that:

 Improve the quality of care by encouraging innovation.

 Allow physicians to concentrate on healing rather than constantly changing administrative rules.

 Restore the patient/physician relationship.

 Increase supply, availability and competition, and thus decrease costs and make it easier to serve those who are most in need of help.

 Discourage frivolous or predatory litigation.

Reform can begin immediately at the individual level, as physicians quit participating in third-party arrangements, and patients fire health plans that insist on intruding into the patient/physician relationship.

Let’s support desirable legislative changes:

 The freedom of patients and physicians to choose or decline to enter relationships on mutually agreeable terms for medical services must be guaranteed. It is in the spirit of Obama’s promise that people could keep their health plan and their doctor.

 The determination of insurance reimbursements must be separated from the determination of fees. We need value-based payment with patients determining the value.

 Tax discrimination must be ended. Under current federal tax code all medical services through employer-owned insurance policies are purchased with pre-tax dollars while individually owned insurance or out-of-pocket payments must be made with after-tax dollars.

 The McCarran Ferguson exemption that protects the business of insurance from antitrust law should be repealed. The insurance industry should have to operate under the same rules as other enterprises.

 Americans should be allowed to purchase insurance across state lines.

Residents of New York and New Jersey, where individual policies are prohibitively expensive, could buy a policy in another state.

 Government insurance benefits should be paid to the beneficiary instead of directly to the provider. This change would virtually eliminate fraud from providing “fictitious” services to “nonexistent” beneficiaries.

 Applying equal protection of the laws to plaintiffs and defendants should decrease predatory or frivolous litigation and thus decrease excess costs from defensive medicine. Lets develop other means of protection against bad medical outcomes including better disability insurance purchased by patients.

Let’s support the right kind of change from the “status quo.”

Michael Arnold Glueck

Newport Beach