Richard E Kelly

The 2010 Health Care Reform Law

Does it Make Sense for America?

By Richard E. Kelly, January 24, 2011

Before passage of the 2010 Health Care Reform Law, most Americans would have agreed that our health care system was flawed. And they would have cited high premiums, rapidly rising costs, insurance companies denying coverage at their discretion, and millions of American citizens unable to afford quality, reliable health care at affordable prices. So why now the cry to appeal health care reform, which appeared to have remedied many of those flaws?

Both political parties share responsibility for the flap-doodle. While health care misinformation is now at war-time propaganda levels, the roots of the problem began before the bill was passed. Among them were the lack of objective debate; ambiguous wording of the voluminous 1,017-page bill; wide disagreement between Democrats on how to implement universal health care; the appearance of impropriety—Washington making customary side deals to purchase passage of the law; and the inability of the President to frame the goals and objectives for reform in simple, easy-to-understand language.

To add insult to injury, we are now bombarded with distorted truths and overt misinformation about the 2010 Law. If Mark Twain were alive today, he might have diagnosed our problem as follows: “What gets most Americans into trouble in this health care debate is not that they know so little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.”

Giving credibility to borrowing Twain’s assertion are polls showing an alarmingly disproportionate number of Americans who believe these things that ain’t so, including such fabrications as the new health care law covers illegal immigrants; Americans have no choice in the health benefits they receive; death panels will decide who lives; the government will set doctors’ wages; and no chemo treatment for older Medicare patients.

Per PolitiFact, the number one that ain’t so for 2010 because virtually every Republican leader told it repeatedly to the American public was: the health care reform law is a “government takeover of health care.”

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For as long as I can remember, books and and the written word have been an important part of my life.  In fact, I wouldn’t be who I am without them. For me, it was a very special privilege to be invited last May to participate, along with four hundred other authors, in the first annual two-day Tucson Festival of Books in March 2009. Scheduled to be held on the lovely University of Arizona campus, I could not imagine a better setting for the fifty thousand readers that were expected to attend.

Seven months before the book fair, I received a phone call from a lady on the Festival’s planning committee. She had read my book,Growing Up in Mama’s Club, and Esther Royer Ayers’ Rolling Down Black Stockings, a memoir about growing up as an Old Order Mennonite. She believed we both had interesting stories to tell and wondered if I would be willing to put on a one-hour presentation with Esther to share our childhood experiences. This presentation would be in addition to the time each author would be allowed to sell and sign books at their assigned booths. Continue Reading »

During the last fifteen years of my work life, I was a strong believer and fervent practitioner of Continuous Improvement as a business strategy. So earlier this year when I suggested to my friend John Hoyle that he consider using CI to make http://JustOneOpinion.com, a news Blog that we co-edit, a more informative, entertaining experience, and to offer a broader range of topics to its readers, he figured he had no choice in the matter and agreed to try it.

While it’s true that I made the initial suggestion and recommendations on how to accomplish this goal, I had no idea how excited and energized John would become with the process of CI. Ever since that discussion he has been a human dynamo in implementing new ideas and testing new techniques.  Now, after several months of trial and error, we are prepared to share our improvement plan with our readers.

Our first and most important move will be to add four, or possibly five, additional contributors to our writing staff. These men and women are all published authors who share a down-to-earth, common sense view of life.  Our common goal will be to share well-thought-out opinions on a broad range of interesting, relevant, and timely topics that each of us feel passionate about. Continue Reading »