The Healthcare Debate

The current healthcare bill that just passed before Congress is too complicated and too costly to sell to the American public. President Obama has the right idea when it comes to providing access to health care for all. With over forty million uninsured Americans, clearly something must be done. A healthy America is not only a noble goal, it makes us more competitive in the global economic landscape. However there is too much money being spent too soon in the current proposal before Congress to fully digest where all that money is going. The two main problems with healthcare reform as it is being presently proposed are waste and the forceful way that it is being jammed through Congress by making health care insurance mandatory.

The current system being proposed makes it mandatory for all Americans to buy health insurance, even those that don't want or need it. Although the argument that people such as healthy twenty somethings should pay up for the overall good of the less healthly among us, this is inherently wasteful to the individual that does not need healthcare. There is an entire generation of people coming through college not on scholarship, struggling to pay their way through college, and saddled with student loan debt that is unconscionable and unimaginable, and is creating a class of workers that borders on indentured servitude. To require a new college graduate to assume the burden of even more debt in the form of mandatory healthcare insurance on top of a mountain of student loans is obscene.

A much better solution is to give the individual an annual stipend with the choice of purchasing healthcare insurance, or not buying healthcare insurance at all. Give the individual a certain amount of money each year, based on income, to be used at his or her discretion for any healthcare issue that may arise. All the money that is being proposed now in a mandatory health care insurance plan would be far better used in the form of health care subsidies that may be used soley for healthcare. If the individual does not need any healthcare for any particular year, the money is saved and not issued by the government. This is far more efficient than forcing everyone to buy healthcare insurance whether they need it or not. Some of the provisions before Congress now like dropping pre-exisisting conditions as a reason to deny healthcare coverage make sense, but forcing insurance companies to comply is not the free market way that will work. A provision in the healthcare bill can be made that only allows only those healthcare insurance companies that drop pre-existing conditions to get the subsidies granted to the patients.

In a system whereby citizens receive a subsidy that is appropriate to income, the free market would adjust and there would be no shortage of health care as is the fear with the current proposals on the table. More young well educated people in college would choose medicine over such disciplines as law and other high professions because of the increased demand in health care that would come in universal health care coverage by way of the subsidies. Medical schools would expand their admissions and new medical schools would spring up across the land to accomodate demand for more Americans finally able to realize affordable health care.New health care models such as H.M.O.s and P.P.O's would spring up across the nation and new companies would be started by entrepreneurial doctors, spurring economic growth. The overall economic boost to the economy would be substantial.

Unlike current proposals where health care would be mandatory and a tax or fine would be levied for failing to utilize the health care system, people sould have the option of using their health care subsidy dollars or not, but would have to use their health care subsidy dollars for health care.

The free market works. It has been tested time and time again and always rings true. What the health care system needs is a boost, based on individual needs not a complete overhaul.

Paper not Plastic

by Andrew Chulock

When I was a volunteer for UPI in the 1984 elections, I was given a tally to telephone to UPI from the individual precinct I was assigned to. Although they may have used a mode other than paper, a system where volunteers from the general public at large can stay and watch their individual precinct count is a system that works because it has multiple independent redundant and verifiable links. For example, if I had reported the wrong number of votes for either Mondale or Reagan, there was the person that handed off the numbers for me to report, as well as the individual volunteers at the precinct who stayed to watch the vote count.

I then reported the numbers to along with many other volunteers at other precincts across the nation and UPI had their vote tally. Other press agencies undoubtedly had other volunteers and workers doing the same, so if AP,UPI, the major networks had different numbers, their was a way to cross reference each other as well as the official vote tally from the government.

Computer voting to me seems far less reliable. The iregularities in Florida, as bad as they were, is not a prototype nor an excuse to implement a new system that is untried and and untested in an era with so many computer errors where people have trouble just logging on to their own computers sometimes. The punchcards, as bad as they were in 2000, worked in Florida for many generations, they left physical evidence of people's choice. The 1984 election in Indiana worked for me, even though I voted for Mondale. As exciting as this election campaign has been thus far and what the general election looks to be, I'm choosing paper over plastic.