The health care reform debate that has captivated and
polarized the American populous for the past few years has been, to a large
extent, an exercise in national insanity.
If our Congressional representatives and our President remain committed
to giving quality medical care to every person in the United States, then there
is now an opportunity to let sanity
reign in proscribing and prescribing solutions to re-engineer our health care
delivery system.
According to the 2011 CDC
FactStats * for adults age 18-64:
- The approximate percent without healthcare insurance is 22.3%
- The approximate percent with private
insurance is 64.1%
- The approximate percent with a public health plan coverage is 15.0%
For Children
under age 18:
- The percent uninsured is 7.8%
- The percent with private insurance is 53.8%
- The percent with a public health plan coverage is 39.8%
Let’s assume that we find a way to keep Medicare intact, and
make sure that physicians and other health care professionals are properly
reimbursed for their education, experience, and training. Under this reasonable
assumption, our only real challenge is to write a reform law that uses the
insider insights of healthcare experts (not policy wonks or partisans).
When the ‘Affordable Care Act’ is ruled unconstitutional and/or
dismembered to the point of being essentially scrapped, we will need doctors
themselves to fashion a replacement law for the 7.8 to 22.3% of Americans
without health care coverage.
AMS recommends that the American Medical Association give up
its expensive perks and salaries, and stop wasting what is essentially
tax-payer money on television commercials and print ads trying to convince us
that they are still relevant; instead, lets envision that the AMA donates its
$70-plus million dollar annual government-sanctioned billing code copyright
income to a truly representative, physician-based task force—one charged with
re-writing a workable health care reform law.
This body should be staffed 100% with physicians and nurses, from every
community in America—elected not by the AMA, but by community doctors
themselves who deliver the majority of care in this country.
The committee would post its progress online, and
periodically query every practicing doctor through password protected online
voting. The progress of the committee
would be visible to everyone by way of a visual web-based ‘map’. With the scroll of a mouse, every community’s doctor would be able to track the progress of his colleague’s views and inputs,
as well as the national consensus, on various reform initiatives.
By using the best of our nation’s democratic tradition, and
through the proper utilization of ‘representative’ governance in the medical
community, we can achieve a fair, prudent, and transparent process toward the
inevitable replacement of Obamacare.
* http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/hinsure.htm
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Bill Gunderson 
