Carson’s health care plan centers on savings accounts

ANKENY - Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for president, talked about his health care plan Friday during a stop in Iowa.

Carson's plan would rely heavily on creating government-funded health savings accounts for Americans, eschewing traditional government health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

'I love the concept of the health savings account because it puts the patient in charge of health care,” Carson told reporters at a news conference Friday at Des Moines Area Community College's Ankeny campus.

While on campus, Carson also spent an hour speaking to and taking questions from roughly 300 people at a health care townhall event.

Carson said the health savings accounts could be shared within families and bequeathed to younger generations. He said he is so confident his plan will drive down health care costs and health care spending that people will wind up with 'enormous sums of money” in their health savings accounts.

'You give people the ability to shift money in the health savings accounts within their families … it makes every family their own insurance company,” Carson said. 'With no middle man, imagine how effective that is in terms of covering almost anything that comes up except for catastrophic events.”

Carson said people still would need catastrophic health insurance, but he thinks that cost will greatly decrease under his plan because it would be spent only on truly catastrophic events.

Carson used the day to unveil his team of supporters from the health care industry, including Christina Taylor, a West Des Moines physician and the wife of state Rep. Rob Taylor, who also supports Carson.

'I want what I think you want as well: a leader who understands what it means to treat and help a patient … who knows how to advocate for the patient as well as the providers,” Christina Taylor told the townhall crowd. 'Dr. Ben is a true problem-solver. … We need him to unite us and bring us together and heal this nation.”

Christine Parker, a DMACC nursing student from Des Moines who attended Friday's event, said she liked some of what Carson had to say but also wished he had more specifics. She pointed to a question he fielded about projected physician and nurse shortages, to which Carson replied, 'That is not an easy one.” He said his plan would make the medical field more attractive and not push out physicians and nurses.

'I wasn't satisfied with that answer,” Parker said.

Parker also said she would have liked to hear more about Carson's health savings account plan, in particular what would happen to individuals or families with high medical costs because of severe illnesses such as cancer.

'What happens if cancer runs in your family? That's expensive,” Parker said.

The Iowa Democratic Party expressed skepticism with Carson's health savings plan and also criticized the candidate for his remarks about vaccinations during the second GOP presidential candidate debate last month.

Some thought Carson should have been more forceful in rebutting fellow candidate Donald Trump's assertion that some vaccines might lead to autism, a belief that has been widely discredited by medical research.

'The only thing you need know about health care under Ben Carson's plans is that there would be less of it,” Democratic Party spokesman Sam Lau said in a statement. The plan, Lau said, would 'end Medicare and Medicaid, could cut entitlement benefits by 40 percent and would put the government in between a woman and her doctor.”