I for one am breathing a sigh of relief that the healthcare bill in Congress and the Senate will be set aside for the time being so that the Obama administration can concentrate on creating more jobs and stimulating the economy, areas of vital interest to all the citizenry of our country. Our healthcare system is way too important to allow such a mammoth, ill-conceived, politically-motivated piece of legislation to be rammed through the legislative process in the dark of night.
The old saying that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck is undoubtedly true about this unpopular health care legislation. Like everyone else in this country, I’d like to see my health care costs reduced, but it became very clear to those of us who followed it closely in the last months that that wasn’t going to happen in the Senate’s version or Congress’s version of the bill. So what good was it?
Give it a rest I say and come back in awhile with both teams on board to work on a plan that substantially reduces the waste and fraud in the Medicare system first. Have them also get busy opening up the individual state markets so that the increased competition among health care insurance companies can work to make costs fair to the consumers. And let them start working on reducing the exorbitant medical malpractice awards which so significantly affect our health care costs. We shouldn’t throw our seniors under the bus of a newly-minted, gargantuan bureaucratic policy which tries to pay doctors and nurses less for taking care of 30 million more people. Folks, any way you looked at it, it just didn’t add up.
Another thing I’m against that happened here in San Francisco in the first week of the New Year is that our city’s Supervisors voted unanimously to allow felons and people with serious misdemeanors to work as caregivers for the city’s In Home Supportive Services consortium for low income citizens. While I do believe in second chances, I don’t think those chances should be in the unsupervised homes of sick and vulnerable people. Areas of work in manufacturing, sanitation, parks departments, the trucking industry or civil service, perhaps, to name a few, would certainly be more appropriate settings for people who have violated our trust enough to be incarcerated in jails and prisons. There’s enough senior abuse out there that we are doing a poor job of combating, due to lack of resources, that we should absolutely not be exposing these poor, indigent seniors to such a risk.
And finally, I’d like to say that our hearts and prayers go out to the citizens of Haiti as they try to survive the worst earthquake disaster anyone has seen in this part of the world. May the people there find some small measure of comfort in knowing that many, many people in the world really do care about the tragic plight of the people of Haiti and are doing their best to mobilize the help they need to survive, heal and rebuild their lives. May G-d bless them and the people who come to their aid.
