Health Care Reform: Part II

As many of you have probably heard the new health care plan has passed through the senate and now is one Christmas Eve senate vote away from passing. As predicted, it was passed 60-40 right down party lines which makes me wonder how anything meaningful ever gets through when there isn't a filibuster-proof majority. You would think that universal health care is something that everyone in the country would want, but for some reason it's not.

If things follow through and the bill is passed, hopefully it will provide some sort of spark to the Obama administration which has been slowly losing its once massive public support. There are many things I'd like to see in this country that improve the quality of life for everyone from the environment to cheaper food that doesn't come from McDonalds but health care is one of those now or never issues. I'm personally looking forward to the proposed health care because hopefully I can afford it. As it turns out, I'm living below the poverty line in terms of income. My parents are too worried about me to let me be without health care so they happily pay for an individual plan for me, but I'd rather pay for myself and I'm hoping the plan allows people like me the opportunity to afford it. It's a system that contingent on people like me buying into it.

Majority leader Harry Reid said, "This is not about politics. This is not about polling. It’s about people. It’s about life and death in America. It’s about human suffering, and given the chance to relieve this suffering, we must. Citizens in each of our states have written to tell us they’re broke because of our broken health care system."

It's not a perfect bill. I think the one glaring mistake is any lack of tort reform. This needs to be addressed. Democrats are so hell bent on 'giving back to the little guy' that they don't take into account anyone else and refuse to believe that the little guy has a flame thrower in his hands. Essentially the issue is this: doctors get sued too much and as a result when a patient comes in complaining of one obvious symptom, they are forced to perform many meaningless tests to rule out anything else so they don't get sued. These tests make hospital bills go up, which make insurance bills go up which makes the patients bills go up. It needs to be stopped.

Anyway, we'll see what happens. If anyone has a link to the bill, I'd like to glance through it.

Go big.

-M, p, z & shredder