As The Plan Comes In For A Landing (Crash?)

Can’t you just feel the joy, the excitement, the anticipation of the new Health Care Reform plan? It’s all the buzz in the news. All Congress has to do is merge the various House bills with the various Senate bills to render a comprehensive and cohesive bill for both to vote on and if passed to send to the President to sign into law. This task of merging the bills is a routine task that the House and Senate undertake on every bill. So with the vast experience and talents that Congress has acquired in making new laws, this should be a smooth and simple effort; not the confusing and confrontational chaos that Congress has engaged in getting to this point. The most complex part of their job is making the compromises that will be required to meld and weld together this merged masterpiece. At the end of this process, we the American people will have a completely compromised Health Care system.

Wait! Isn’t compromised sometimes a bad thing? I mean, if your health is compromised, or the security system at your bank or financial institution is compromised; don’t we usually get very upset and fearful of the impacts that such circumstances can have on us? I think it would be prudent of us to make sure that we understand what kind of compromises Congress is going to make on our behalf. As they work out their differences in position and opinion of the plethora of the new governmental Health Care policies, I would like to know that they are choosing a settlement of their differences by making mutual concessions that satisfy the original goals that they said they were working to achieve. I don’t want to see them tweaking the language in the bill to eliminate the conflicting issues so that the Insurance industry or the Medical professions and associations are satisfied that they will benefit, and that I will be only obligated to pay for it and accept the consequences good or bad. If Congress goes after their typical tit for tat modifications on each sides demands, we will wind up with the usual poorly defined and operationalized bureaucratic disaster.

A compromising Congress will not find any better result from merging multiple versions of bills that individually would fail under their own incompetency. Just finding ways to constrain, limit, direct, or obfuscate the polices and processes that their Health Care Reform act will create will not make it capable of improving the defects in the system that we live under today.

The way to improve the Health Care system is to use the same mechanism that drives our economy and wealth today. We need the new Health Care system to reward efficiency, competition, and innovation. And that is not something you get by pushing more money into the system, and not by dictating that you will be a better system because Congress passed a bill that says: You will do better and do it for less because we wrote it down in our bill.

Given that Congress-men/women know first-hand that you can buy anything for a price, I mean being politicians they have sold themselves many times over, they think that you can get the world-class affordable Health Care system that we all would want if they throw our money at it. Not being individuals that have any experience in solving problems (other than the “I’ll just throw money at it kind.”) how likely are they to solve a problem as complex as Health Care in America?

Of course, you did elect them; so I suppose you are absolute confident that these guys/gals know what they are doing.