Elections are about making promises and making friends; governing is about making choices and making enemies. If President Obama wants health care reform then, both for political and policy reasons, he needs to start making some real enemies on his left because the strategy of conditioning passage on an all-liberal-with-a-few-moderates strategy will not work.
The President should begin the upcoming February 25 symposium on health care reform by reaffirming his unwavering commitment to universal access, higher quality care and controlling costs. Next and as importantly he needs to acknowledge the real lesson of both his health care reform efforts to date and the failure of Hillarycare which is that neither our political system nor the majority of American think it is a good idea to have Washington redesign our entire health care system in one fell swoop...and for good reason. It requires a special combination of ignorance and arrogance to believe that a bunch of politicians and their staffs can redesign a large chunk of the economy without massive unintended consequences and thus incur the potential risk that the outcome could be a worse system than we have now, not a better one.
We should be ambitious about our goals and modest about our confidence that they can all be achieved immediately. Incremental reform is not a great political slogan, but it can be the basis of thoughtful change.
Three areas of incremental reform should be included as part of the upcoming symposium debate: 1) Most favored nation pricing for drugs which would require US pharmaceutical companies to offer US citizens the same pricing that they negotiate with other governments such as Canada. We don't need to re-import drugs from Canada; we just need them priced at the same levels as in Canada; 2) tort reform which would focus on faster and more predictable resolutions of medical malpractice allegations (using a combination of specialty health care courts and arbitration proceedings). This kind of reform would also require complete transparency in these proceedings so that we can create a constant information feedback loop to the medical industry. Only this kind of quick and comprehensive information flow about mistakes will provide the basis for a system of continuous quality improvement; and 3) a national reinsurance pool that would provide subsidies which would extend the reach and affordability of health care insurance to citizens who either can't afford it or have preexisting conditions which preclude them from obtaining it.
If the President is calculating that his symposium will allow him to bludgeon Republicans and moderate Democrats into supporting the existing health care legislation, he will be sorely disappointed. On the other hand, if he uses the forum to seriously consider incremental changes that use a combination of market mechanisms and government regulation to begin transforming our health care system into one that provides more coverage at lower costs with higher quality, then he will go down in history as the President who led the way on providing the American people with the health care system they deserve.
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I write more about it here:
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The debate needs to leave Washington
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Just to get started, I have an idea of life-cycle health insurance, and try to stir the debate,
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Let bring outside of Washington ideas to the February 25 symposium and let us work on the solution independen
Employment is a far more important issue to citizens, yet no one is suggesting univeral mandatory employment
If the states wish to introduce health care that is commensura
In America as seen by Mr. Williams, “If you don't work, you don't eat”. In America as seen by me, many people who do not work are overweight
In America as seen by Mr. Williams, “The vast majority of the people will survive without mandated health care. Those that need immediate medical attention will get it regardless of their financial state.” In America as seen by me, I pay for that, in form of taxes or increased my health insurance premium; in other word, in mandated payments.
It is time to put beliefs aside and depend on empirical data. This one-minute video tells it best,
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Ladies and gentlemen, this writer started off his article trying to pass off the CENTRIST health insurance bill that the Senate and Obama is endorsing off as "liberal".
See how it works? Pass off failed CENTRIST policies as liberal / progressiv
It's also a weakass attempt to move liberals to the right.
Earth to Mr. Davis - this is a bill CRAFTED BY CENTRISTS for CENTRISTS to appease the ever changing minds of so-called "Independe