Description: For decades, policymakers at all levels of government have struggled to meet citizens' demands to contain the costs of health care, expand access to coverage and services, and maintain quality. Legislators' efforts to fix the current system have produced many counter-productive responses. Consumers have little freedom and few choices in purchasing health care. Empowering Health Care Consumers through Tax Reform offers a solution to this problem by proposing a system that provides a dynamic and competitive marketplace in which consumers make their own health care decisions. This book examines the option created by the intersection of health policy and tax reform.

The pervasive anxiety about the health care system in the United States along with increasing frustration with the tax system provide an historic opportunity to meet this challenge. Here, health policy analysts, economists, employer group and union representatives, physicians, and political leaders examine the crucial link between two major domestic policy issues to explore a revolutionary idea: That health care costs can be contained and access to care vastly expanded by joining health care reform with tax reform. The contributors describe the distortions in the health care system caused by our current tax policy and paint their vision of a vibrant and responsive, free-market system. Their vision of tax reform coupled with health reform could finally create a win-win scenario for consumers, the medical profession, policymakers, and the future U.S. health care system.

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