Who's In Charge?

Lately, there have been a lot of "Town Meetings". I'm sure you have heard all the concerned citizens (both pro and con) ask questions of their Representatives about the proposed Health Care Legislation. Some got legitimate answers and some got platitudes and generalizations that bear no relationship to the current House Bill. It is obvious to me that most of these Representatives have not read the bill or if they have, they quite frankly don't understand what they have read. That is no surprise to me. I spent several days reading through the bill and found that there are many contradictions within the bill itself. I'm not going to waste my time pointing these out to you because the bill, quite frankly, does nothing to lower health insurance costs or provide better quality health care at a reduced cost. However, when I hear Congressmen say that these people don't represent the "real" people, I ask myself, "Who's in Charge?" Do we work for them or do they work for us?

This bill shows the disconnect between what Citizens are expecting and what Congress sees as an opportunity to control one-sixth of the US Economy. It doesn't take over 1,000 pages of text to fix the problem with costs. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the primary reason for higher costs is the cost of malpractice insurance that doctors, hospitals, and others have to pay to protect themselves from lawsuits. Since the Congress is made up (in large part) of lawyers, it is clear to me that they have their own self-preservation (or their friends) in mind and do not want to address tort reform, which would lower the settlement costs and therefore fees that lawyers collect on large malpractice lawsuits.

Quite honestly, it would be cheaper to add all the uninsured to the Government's Health Care package, administered by Blue Cross - Blue Shield. Oh yes, they don't want Government-run health care. Why should they? After all, we are footing the bill for their health insurance coverage.

I heard President Obama's town hall address in "friendly" New Hampshire, and couldn't believe my ears. He was making the analogy that having a public option would not affect profitability of private insurance companies. In the analogy, he stated that Federal Express and United Parcel Service were doing just fine competing against the US Post Office and that it was the Post Office that was having difficulty. I do agree with his statement but it just points out that a privately run company can be far more efficient and cost effective than a Government bureaucracy.

People, stop listening to the generalities put forth by your Congressmen and Senators. Think about what needs to be done and then ask them how the current proposed bill will solve those problems. This isn't rocket science. The problem has been there for a long time. What they were hoping was that you would be so frustrated with the rising cost of health insurance that they could just take it over - possibly not right away but over time. Single payer health care is not the solution to quality health care - it will not reduce costs; it will not provide better health care; it will not be efficient. Ask any retired military how well they like their insurance; ask anyone utilizing VA health services (you may have seen the article where several x-military persons ended up with Hepatitis and HIV from Colonoscopies. Most of the doctors at the VA are either right out of school and just getting some early training, or they can't make it on their own (I did say most, not all).

Quite honestly, I am more concerned with Dental insurance costs than I am with health care insurance. Let's reform Dental insurance!