Thursday, March 25, 2010

Health care reform


I don’t usually draw cartoons on national issues, but I thought this cartoon did a pretty good job of summing up my feelings on our new health care bill.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the Democrats passed a health care reform bill.

It's good that insurance company's can no longer cry "pre-existing condition” and drop paying customers as soon as they get sick. I'm glad kids won't be denied insurance on the basis of pre-existing conditions anymore, and it's good that millions more Americans will have access to health insurance.

But for as massive as this bill is, there is very little in it that will actually make health care cost less and that is the crisis we are facing. Health care is too darn expensive, whether or not you have insurance to pay for it.

This bill needed to include serious tort reform and incentives to end the obscene practice of paying doctors by the amount of tests they order and not by the health of their patients. If you could somehow add provisions like these the bill, it would have been a lot better.

Of course these are conservative ideas, and the GOP was too busy orchestrating the president’s Waterloo and calling everyone and their dog a socialist to seriously help craft good legislation

1 comment:

Preston said...

THIS MOMENTOUS DAY!

Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s syndrome child.

Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example.

Each smallest act of kindness – even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile – reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away.

Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will.

All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined – those dead, those living, those generations yet to come – that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.

Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength – the very survival – of the human tapestry.

Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in THIS MOMENTOUS DAY!

Excerpt from Dean Koontz’s book, “From the Corner of His Eye”.

It embodies the idea of how the smallest of acts can have such a profound effect on each of our lives.