Well known “Think Tank” the Brookings Institute, recently put their collective minds to coming up with practical solutions to solve the demand for affordable health insurance and healthcare reform.

The result: Four possible approaches to achieving a practical Universal Healthcare system here in the United States. 

• One proposal, which was worked out with healthcare experts from The National Institutes of Health and Stanford University, calls for a Federal voucher system that offers a set package of health insurance benefits much like employer-sponsored medical coverage. In  this idea, funding would be provided by value-added taxes
  
  
• A second plan suggested by the Heritage Foundation, recommends a “Health Exchange Plan" that would allow affordable private health insurance policies to be portable through a network of state-chartered "insurance exchanges". The Heritage plan is targeted out overcoming current insurance rate disparities that vary greatly from State to State and revamp current tax subsidies and programs designed to bring affordable medical coverage to lower-income families
  
  
• A third proposal, which involved experts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, calls upon the expansion of Medicare to provide affordable medical coverage for all Americans. Under the Bloomberg proposal anyone without health insurance would be allowed to enroll in Medicare. Those receiving employer based health benefits or with private health insurance would be entitled to keep their coverage. The proposal would mandate all U.S. residents to have healthcare insurance and requires al employers to provide a health insurance plan for their workers. In this program subsidies would be provided for low- and moderate- income families;
  
  
• The fourth plan, by MIT calls for expanding the current Massachusetts healthcare insurance law nationwide. The Massachusetts law, which went into effect in July 2007, requires all residents have health insurance coverage. The State plan offers subsidies for lower-income residents to help comply with the Mandate.  The law also created a state-run marketplace called the Connector, which helps all state residents and small businesses access affordable health insurance plans to comply with the mandate.

According to reports, analysts of all four proposals said that no one of the ideas was perfect in terms of real world viability, but they each had some merit. Former CMS Administrator Mark McClellan, one of the analysts from the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, said the best plan of action would be to make careful and regulated health insurance reforms over time, allowing people to choose how they approach their health insurance coverage. He added that healthcare insurance reform needs to begin at the state level.