Simplifying Health Care

Posted on by Joseph Sparks

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” – Pres. Donald Trump, Feb. 27, 2017

Shortly after I bought my first house, a toilet handle broke. I am not much of a do-it-yourselfer. However, even I knew that fixing a broken toilet handle is a five-minute job. I had done it quickly and easily before.

Removing the old handle was easy enough. I confidently went to put the square mounting nut in the hole. It would not fit. I looked and somebody had used a round metal mounting nut, so I needed to remove that. I got a screwdriver and tried to pry it loose. That nut was glued tight to the tank. Nobody in his right mind would do that. I figure the former owner’s brother-in-law was a plumber who owned a supply store filled with nonstandard parts that he needed to sell.

I tried hitting the screwdriver with a hammer, but decided to stop for fear of cracking the tank. I started filing the metal piece, and it was taking forever. Off to the hardware store to see what might help. I found a file drill bit and bought that. After about four hours of filing spread over two days, the metal piece popped loose. I then replaced the handle in less than five minutes.

Now imagine we had that extra metal piece on every toilet, and that there are thousands of different metal pieces, each requiring a slightly different procedure to remove it. Suddenly replacing a toilet handle becomes very complicated.

When it comes to health care, it becomes complicated because we insist on adding multitudes of those unnecessary metal pieces called health insurance companies. It is made even worse because each metal piece can have many variations with their different policies, each requiring its own separate procedure to “replace the toilet handle.” It gets complicated and expensive very quickly.

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Not Meeting Needs

Posted on by Joseph Sparks

Not Meeting Needs

When I was a boy, my mom would often make me come with her when she would deliver food to older relatives. As a child the last thing I wanted to do was waste my time delivering food, especially when the houses and people often smelled funny. Of course the people were always appreciative, and I remember vaguely one great aunt of mine saying that my mom doing this was close to heaven. I know the aunt was grateful for the food, and it certainly did not hurt that my mom was an excellent cook.

My dad was always supportive, except perhaps for an occasional grimace. If my mom was not able to make dinner because time got away from her, my dad without complaint either took all five of us out to dinner or we got carry out.

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Government is the Solution, a Seismic Shift

Posted on by Joseph Sparks

A major shift in thinking has occurred since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and the political ramifications are likely to be enormous.

At his inaugural in 1981, Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This wrong belief has pervaded and controlled political thought for at least three decades and led to some very bad policies such as the bank deregulation that caused the financial crisis of 2008.

Recently, Republicans realized they have to actually develop a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, and people are demanding that some important features are available in a replacement plan. These features include allowing people with pre-existing conditions to get insurance, no lifetime limits, and allowing children under 26 to stay on their parents’ plans.

It gets even worse for Republicans. People are also demanding improvements such as more affordable premiums and lower copayments and deductibles.

For the first time in many, many years, there is a popular uprising where people are saying to the government, “fix this.” People realize government is the solution.

This is not to say that the government is the solution for everything. However, the right government policies can provide great solutions to some problems as illustrated by health care.

In point of fact the public enables the private, and now that people are realizing this, it signifies a seismic shift in our politics.

The Economic Policy Disaster

Posted on by Joseph Sparks

There was something missing in the coverage of the most recent presidential campaign—policy. The major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted only 32 minutes of airtime to policy issues from the start of 2016 until late October according to the Tyndall Report:

No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.

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