Obama’s hurried and flawed plan needs some major tweaking. Check out his OWN Senate record on voting for health care reform….he is a sham.

The American people are not children, we are capable of voting for our wishes and understanding a bill, if GIVEN the chance to read and debate the issues at hand.

This bill needs major changes and this country needs to take the extra few months to get it right. Only the Obama worshippers are for ramming a flawed bill through that even Obama has not read.

This is NOT about Obama….it is about the BILL.

And the bill stinks to high heavens.

Actually that is not quite true.  Under President Clinton, business owners and their employees were given the Archer Medical Savings Account (MSA) plans on January 1, 1997.  They were a ground-breaking, new and innovative way of drastically changing health insurance plans and the mindset of the American people about what health insurance means.  They also included tax benefits.

These MSA plans were proposed as an experiment with a cap on the amount of people able to get them to 750,000. 

Golden Rule Insurance Company, which was started by a family and run as a Mutual company until a few years ago, when they sold the company to United Healthcare, was the ‘Parent’ of the MSA program. They fought and fought with Congress and especially with the IRS to be able to impliment these plans.

President Bush signed into law, on December 8, 2003, as part of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, that these plans would be made available to all Americans. They named the plans, Health Savings Accounts (HSA’s) and fixed a few of the problems that the MSA program had.

Millions of Americans now thrive under these HSA plans and take advantage of the tax benefits.  The health care consumer has taken control over their own care and are paying attention to the actual cost of services instead of just blindly paying copays and never really looking at how much those services are.

Also as part of that same bill that President Bush signed into law, our Seniors now have at least some prescription drug coverage, which they did not have before.  This allowed many Seniors to be able to take their necessary prescriptions that many had been unable to afford before.

There had not been enough done and that’s very apparent, but there has been some measures taken in the past few years.

I just hope we can all work together to create a system that will contain costs and make health care more affordable to all.

Part of that must be tort reform. 

While we must hold irresponsible medical providers accountable, we also must stop frivolous law suits that are instrumental in driving up the costs of health care.  This causes doctors to run unnecessary tests for the CYA factor and drives up the cost of libility insurance, which increases what providers have to charge for services. I’m disturbed that President Obama has said he will not consider tort reform as part of the health care reform changes.

Instead, many are looking to cut services, or as they call it ‘ration health care,’ to Seniors since those are the ‘most costly’ according to them. I wouldn’t want my grandparents denied necessary medical services just because of their age.

I would want a law suit dismissed that was filed by a woman who gave birth to a deformed or dead baby who had never had prenatal care and then blamed the unfortunate doctor who just happened to be the one on call at the time of the birth.

Hopefully with medical care for all, those types of events will not occur as often, and tort reform must be part of the health care reform package to reduce costs.

Time for talk should never be though as long as it is accompanied by action.

The reform package can’t stay as it is now because it’s far from what we need, but it’s sure a start and starting is better than just keeping the broken system we have now. 

We need to put the reform into law now and then we need continual dialogue to work to make it better.