So what happens if the 2010 Health Care Law is repealed? If the health care system in the U.S. is not broke, why fix it? Right?

The engine that drives U.S. health care is health insurance, which will be an unregulated industry if the law is repealed. Unlike bankers and Wall Street, this industry will then be able to police itself, with no government regulations to get in the way of keeping Americans healthy, at least for those who can afford health insurance.

Unfortunately, there are a few doomsayers. Warren Buffet, for one, warns, “If we repeal the current law and do nothing, everyone’s health care will be in jeopardy. The way we are going, within a decade we’ll spend one dollar out of every five we earn on health care – and we’ll keep getting less for our money. Fixing what’s wrong is a necessity we cannot postpone.

“The high costs paid by U.S. companies for employee health care puts them at a competitive disadvantage internationally. That kind of cost, compared with the rest of the world, is like a tapeworm eating at our economic body.” And feeding his warning are the following facts:

• Health care premiums have doubled in the last eight years at a rate 3.7 times faster than wages have increased.
• The U.S. spends 17% of GDP on health care while the rest of the world spends 9% and it has fewer doctors and nurses per person.
• The average cost per person/year for health care is $6,714 for U.S.; $3,678 for Canada; $3,449 for France; and $2,760 for the UK.
• Half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical bills.
• 25% of all medical spending goes to admin/overhead costs.
• Antiquated paper-based record keeping and information systems needlessly increase health care costs.
• Only four cents on every health care dollar spent is on prevention.
• Many businesses cannot provide health care coverage to its employees as it’s too expensive.
• The constantly rising costs of Medicare and Medicaid could lead to fiscal meltdown in the near future.
• Inefficient and poor quality health care costs the US somewhere between 50 to 100 billion dollars a year.
• Millions of dollars are lost each year due to profiteering, resulting in people paying more without receiving better care in return.
• The number of uninsured is growing at an alarming rate. Today it’s 51 million, up from 46 million 9 months ago. If it balloons to 100 million, could that trigger a U.S. health care crash?
• $2.3 trillion plus was spent on health care in 2008.

One knowledgeable insurance executive checked the facts here cited and said, “To the best of my knowledge, this paper is factually accurate.”

“The case that your paper doesn’t make—and as far as I can tell no one has made—is that the proposed health care reform actually addresses the issues that your paper highlights. I understand that this would require a massive explanation. Personally, it troubles me that the government has not attempted to explain its analysis of the problems you’ve outlined or demonstrate how HCR solves those problems.

“Yes, one can imagine how some of the proposed elements of HCR will help, but it would benefit the American public immensely if the government would thoroughly and explicitly describe the problem, explain all of their root cause analysis, describe the potential solutions they explored, justify the solutions they chose, and connect all the dots between problem and solution elements.”

Okay, so what does one expert know? Once the law is repealed, we’d suggest setting the following two goals to improve health care in America:

1. Cut National Health Care Spending by 2 Trillion Dollars in 10 Years
   • This includes Medicare and Medicaid
2. Provide Quality, Affordable Health Care for all Americans
   • Protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of HC costs
   • Guarantee choice of doctors and health plans
   • Invest in prevention and wellness
   • Maintain coverage when a person changes/loses their job
   • End barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing conditions

P.S. Oops! I think those were the goals President Obama and his team set for the current 2010 Health Care Reform Law. So why doesn’t the President just explain the damn law so the average American can understand it?

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.”

The facts show that the 2010 Health Care Reform Law does not allow the government to operate the health care system. Unlike Canada, England and numerous European countries, public-sector or private-sector insurance companies are responsible for operations in the USA. An accurate statement is: the current health care reform law of the land provides (95%) universal coverage through regulated private markets.

So what do we do now? Do we accept the Law as currently written? Do we tweak it to improve it? Do we repeal it? And if so, what do we replace it with? If the “individual mandate,” requiring everyone to have health insurance by 2014, is deemed unconstitutional, is it possible to have universal coverage? And who pays for the medical costs of the uninsured? What happens to the one in seven Americans who did not have or could not afford health insurance before the 2010 Law? Is it still possible to have universal health care by dramatically lowering the age of Medicare?

Whatever answers we eventually embrace as a country, it is important for well-informed citizens to honestly debate health care reform. And, before axing the 2010 Law—if that’s our country’s choice—or trying to answer the aforementioned questions, we need to identify objectively the pros and cons about the current law. Branding or demonizing it as “Obamacare” or “the work of liberals” does not make for constructive dialogue.

If a person is interested in being well informed, innocent of knowing things that ain’t so, and engaging in healthy, civil debate, help is available. Several organizations, ones not beholden to any political party or private interest groups can provide accurate information about the 2010 Heath Care Law. A few of them are The Kaiser Family Foundation, Families USA, AARP, and Docs for America.

While I would like to see an amenable resolution to the health care issue, my motivation for writing this article incubated during the 2010 elections in southern Arizona. One candidate tried to unseat Gabrielle Giffords by bombarding the Tucson landscape with billboards reading, “Giffords forced Obamacare on You!” Many voters accepted this that ain’t so with little or no knowledge of the 2010 health care reform law and, they weren’t embarrassed by the lack of civil, constructive debate on this issue. After the assassination attempt on Giffords’ life, I vowed to do what I could do to try to convince people that we need to have rules for civil debate if our democracy is going to work.

P.S. As I prepared this article for a press release, I was pleased to see Bill Frist, a medical doctor and former Senate Majority Leader (R-Tenn.), telling his constituents that instead of mounting an effort to repeal the Health Reform Law, Republicans should use it as a “platform” for improvements. He further stated that the law has elements that Republicans should be able to get behind, particularly its “federalism” approach to providing health care. “(The Law) has many strong elements, and those elements, whatever happens, need to be preserved, need to be cuddled, need to be snuggled, need to be promoted and need to be implemented.”

A short bio: Richard E. Kelly is a concerned 68-year-old Tucson, AZ resident, published author, freelance writer, retired CEO (33 years) for a west Michigan manufacturing company (Clipper Belt Lacer), the survivor of 16 years growing up in a religious cult, and a political Independent. He can be contacted at rkelly3845@yahoo.com.

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.

One important goal for JustOneOpinion.com will be to share “Blue Sky Ideas,” totally outside-the-box suggestions, about how we could make our world a better place to live now and far into the future. Just imagine how we could take totally fresh approaches to utilizing energy from a wide variety of resources, improving easily accessible health care, and converting to non-polluting electric vehicles – all subjects for future articles.

We will also take a critical look at the current administration of criminal law, the lack of public transportation, economic theory and practice, and the lack of ethics in government - as well as beaurocratic “environmental protection” that ignores common sense and wastes taxpayer money.

We will track what President-elect Obama and the Democrats promised to do before the election. We will report the results of their progress by highlighting universal health care, stem cell research, the economy, a new energy policy, and middle-class tax relief.

We will include feature articles on different countries, cultures, and their key factions. We will tackle the issues of religion and science and their proper place in a modern democracy. We will promote civility at every level of political discourse while encouraging rigorous debate. We will review and recommend books, movies and other media that might make a difference in our lives. We will often take differing views as we debate the effects of “global warming” and offer suggestions as to what, if anything, needs to be done to alleviate its effects.

Our goal will not be to bring you the “TRUTH”, as my mother insisted her view of world events and her interpretation of the Bible were. Instead we want to focus JustOneOpinion’s articles in a way that will help our readers in their “search for the truth.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to religion or politics, we realize that “true believers” are often unable to participate in constructive dialogue. But for those people who consider themselves “open-minded,” our goal will be to help them discard “those things that they know that ain’t so,” as Will Roger’s called them, and to expand their body of knowledge about important issues of the day.

We hope that our approach will provide people with additional ideas, concepts, and new strategies to improve the quality of our life today and for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. To assist us in our learning curve, JOO welcomes the additional insights of four new writers. They are Craig Bieber, Chi Newman, and Bob and Claire Rogers.  Let me introduce them:

CRAIG L. BIEBER

published his first book, Saylor’s Triangle, in January 2008. His book is available at Amazon.com or from his website  SaylorsTriangle.com. Craig was born, raised, and educated in a small ranching town in western South Dakota where imagination, dreams, and literature were his windows to the world. Before he retired, Craig spent forty adventurous years in Alaska, working in the oil industry. He and his wife Claudia now spend six months a year in Anchorage and six months in Tucson, Arizona. Find out more about Craig by visiting his website. And you will not want to miss his first post on JOO entitled, “White Hats and Black Hats.” 

CHI NEWMAN

grew up in Beijing, China, amid manicured courtyards, servants, powerful friends, and lavish entertainments. She attended an exclusive convent school where she learned to speak French and English. At the age of thirteen, Chi’s world turned upside down. To escape the Communists, her parents gave her a small suitcase and put her on a plane to Nanjing. What followed was a fifty-year journey she could not possibly have imagined. Read her story in Farewell, My Beijing: The Long Journey from China to Tucson (available from Amazon.com) or at Chi-Newman.com.

Claire Rogers

writes about the environment, literacy, astronomy, history, adventure travel, sports and fitness, recreational vehicles, and personality profiles. She also writes book and product reviews. Claire recently received a commendation from the Lake County Astronomical Society for an article that appeared in the nationally distributed magazine Geico Direct. Her other publishing credits include the Desert Leaf, the Arizona Daily Star, Highways, and MotorHome and Trailer Life. She enjoys hiking, biking, adventure travel and good times with friends and family.

Robert “Bob” Rogers

(Claire’s husband), worked as a television reporter during undergraduate school before earning an MFA in visual arts at Ohio University. His photojournalism skills led to a popular daily essay in the Athens Messenger. He was published in Et Cetera literary magazine and won two first prizes for short stories in the “Tidepools” literary competition. His first book, a novel titled The Return of No. 44, will be published early in 2009. His earlier work, Tandem, An American Love Story, was represented by the Claudia Menza Agency in 1997. He is working on a second novel while teaming with his wife on a book proposal about sharing their methods for achieving an adventurous lifestyle and financial independence. Bob and Claire are world travelers, including China, Australia, Iceland, and Canada, much of the time on a tandem bicycle, 39,000 miles and counting. They have also spent four months sailing in the South Pacific plus over 60,000 miles of motor home travel in North America. You can read more about Claire and Bob in his own eloquent words at New Bohemians.net. And you will not want to miss Bob’s most recent post on JOO entitled, “The New Homeless.”

In addition to these new contributors, we are hopeful that other interested readers of http://JustOneOpinion.com will contribute their opinions or submit articles about specific topics that are important to them.

As a boy of fifteen, Samuel Clemens had an acquaintance he was very fond of – a delightful young black man named Jerry – a slave – who had the daily habit of preaching sermons from the top of his master’s woodpile. He imitated the pulpit style of the clergymen of his day, and did it well. One of Jerry’s favorite texts was, “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell what his ‘pinions is.”

It seems that the black philosopher’s idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he was to prosper, he had to train with the majority; in matters like politics and religion, he had to think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing. In other words, he had to restrict himself to corn-pone opinions – at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.

Mark Twain thought Jerry was right, in the main, but he did not go far enough. It was Twain’s belief that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention; that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion is a most rare thing – if indeed it ever existed. Basic human instinct moved one to conformity. It is man’s nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. The cause is the inborn requirement of self-approval. And its source is the approval of other people.

We get our notions and habits and opinions from outside influences; we don’t study them. We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate.

The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking.

Why are Catholics, Catholics; Baptists, Baptists; Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jehovah’s Witnesses; Republicans, Republicans; and Democrats, Democrats? Mark Twain believed it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination, that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon religion or politics which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there is nothing but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval.

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently. They arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand which is of no particular value.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it’s the Voice of God.

Now I don’t know if my awareness of corn-pone opinions is why I have no religious affiliation or why I can’t join a political party. But I’m not ashamed to admit that a lot of what I believe, I learned from Mark Twain. Like he said, “The trouble with the world is not that people know so little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.”