Glendale surgeon Paul Toffel recently spoke with L.A. Times Columnist Steve Lopez about our nation’s current healthcare dilemma. Toffel says his solution to the problem is tax-free and apolitical. Paul Toffel is a clinical professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and a head and neck surgeon, with 40 years of experience in the medical field. Like most citizens in this country, he wants to see medicine become more affordable to everyone.

 ”It’s not a Democratic plan,” he tells Lopez. “It’s not a Republican plan. It’s a common sense plan.”

 Toffel suggest switching to competing national plans because he believes if the government were more involved, there would be too many cases of people being denied costly specialized care when they most needed it. He thinks the healthcare structures formed in the 70s and 80s have created problems that we’re still paying for.

 His five-point plan suggests that competing national plans be required to take all people, with no exemptions for pre-existing conditions. He encourages reinstating federal regulations to shift the focus from money back to the original mission—treating the sick. He’d also like to stay away from employment-based healthcare. He thinks doing so will allow companies to pay higher salaries, and employees can then shop around for their own plans. Toffel would like to cap frivolous malpractice suits across the nation.

Lastly, Toffel wants to see teaching hospitals treating uninsured members of the community. “If there’s a publicly funded component to Toffel’s plan,” Lopez reports, “it’s that such schools would be subsidized as necessary with grants and a variety of federal, state and local funding.”

“Great USA-style medical care can be provided cost-effectively,” says Toffel, “in simple perk-free settings, as in the U.S. military hospitals, without requiring private rooms and flat-screen TVs for every patient.”

Toffel’s plan offers new insight into the current healthcare crisis, although not all will agree with his ideas. Lopez says, “The result is a document that Democrats will love and hate, and the same is true for Republicans,” which Toffel gladly takes as a compliment.

To read the full L.A. Times article, click here.

Photo Courtesy of the Sinus Nasal Center.

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