Roadmap to Raising Michigan’s Healthcare Freedom Scores: 1

The Roadmap to raising healthcare freedom scores identifies Michigan’s top state health policy barriers to healthcare freedom. You can download it here, along with the MHF Report Cards for 2020 and 2022.
Roadmap articles explain these issues, their significance to our healthcare problems, and the road forward to freedom solutions.

Why Comprehensive Scores?

Many of us have a top healthcare freedom that concerns us most. However, in real life, the healthcare freedoms of patients, clinicians, families and businesses all work together. MHF grades all bills as Pass or Fail according to who benefits: special interests or individual rights.

Michigan is catching on: legislator scores are not all that great.

Michigan Healthcare Freedom is raising awareness with the campaign to distribute MHF 2022 Report Cards to all 83 counties in Michigan. (Order yours here: enter the quantity in the memo line with a donation of any amount.)

Awareness is an important first step, but to achieve healthcare freedom, we need state health policy that reflects freedom principles.

State Legislators are the Key

Legislators pass all health policy legislation and funding. Not unreasonably, voters expect their elected legislators to represent the people’s interests.

What is unreasonable is to assume good representation will happen without our effort. When special interests win and individual rights lose, frustrated voters believe the ballot box is the only option.

That’s a mistake. You see, new legislators have a steep learning curve.. No one is born understanding health policy, and it can’t be learned overnight.

So, instead of watching every new legislator repeat the cycle of special interest domination, how can we raise healthcare freedom scores?

We must understand the practical issues (as distinguished from headlines, big lobby talking points, and campaign slogans), and communicate them to legislators. Our lives and livelihoods literally depend on this.

Insight: Why should legislators care about issues their constituents ignore?

Action item: join our Michigan-only facebook group, where MHF grows the state health policy conversation. Note: we screen for bots, so you must answer questions to join.

Roadmap Issue One:

1. Do you support repealing Michigan’s Certificate of Need law? (Y)

I recently explained reasons to repeal Michigan Certificate of Need. Now, instead of repealing these harmful laws, Michigan wants to expand them.

One week from today, MDHHS proposes to extend its CON authority to regulate hospital MRI units. (Wait – didn’t we just say elected legislators pass laws? Well, these are only rules… but they will still affect your healthcare.)

As an eye-popping example of state micromanagement, it is hard to beat this 12 page list of MDHHS-proposed rule changes.