We are being drown in rhetoric about health care these days. It is a typical redneck response I'm sure, but I believe about ninety percent of it is thrown in there by the medical profession or the insurance companies or both to confuse us into giving up and leaving things as they are so the high profit margins in those two professions can be retained. I've heard about several good ideas followed by a torrent of unconvincing criticism condemning each of them. In any case, here is my own opinion of the health care phenomenon and a compilation of those ideas I've heard.  (2011 update:  Anyone who hasn't read T.R. Reid's "The Healing of America" shouldn't even be allowed into the debate.  That would spare all of us a bunch of erroneous dribble.)

There is a prevailing notion that the best health care medical technology can provide is a right to which all Americans should have access either free or at least at cut rate prices. If that were possible, Russia would have buried us as they promised. They killed twenty million of their own kind and left every surviving individual in the country in the mental and emotional state of an abused child in their attempt to provide the essentials of life for their people at cut rate prices and they still failed. If we tried we would achieve the same result because it is not fair. When people have unfairness imposed upon them they feel abused. It is not fair for those who live life one day at a time to enjoy the same benefits as those who look down the road as far as possible and take the responsibility to provide in advance for their own necessities of life.

However, we are living in a great humanitarian age in a God-fearing nation in which it is untenable to allow the irresponsible to die in the streets as just punishment for their irresponsibility. Yet to insure the irresponsible at the expense of the public is unfair to the responsible. Hence, a law requiring everyone to join some sort of health insurance plan is more a protection of the responsible from the irresponsible than a benefit of the irresponsible although it does both. (Mind you, I'm not denigrating anybody. When you are young and healthy and poor, health insurance is the last thing on your mind. I never gave it a second thought until I rolled around in frightened agony on a cot in a Tennessee hospital emergency room for six hours before a friend showed up with the fifty dollars required before I could be admitted for an appendectomy.) Here is an outline of my proposal:

1. Make it a law that everyone must enroll in a health plan of some kind or another, unless they can prove conscientious objections for religious reasons.  (2011 update:  Ok, what about trampling on people's rights?  Bullbleep!  Well, how about this.  You are free to not buy medical insurance if we are free to allow you to die on the steps of the hospital unless you can come up with a 10 percent down payment before being admitted, regardless of the severity of your situation.  I bet that'll make you reconsider, it sure did me.  But we can't require people to buy health insurance and leave them at the mercy of the current health care providers.  So ...)

2. Establish a national health insurance plan with:

a) Basic medical care at a base line cost, (includes dental).

b) If one chooses, he or she can accept periodic drug tests, (includes tobacco and alcohol), if he or she passes, he or she will receive a fair reduction in fees based upon actuarial calculations.

c) You select whatever doctor you want. Insurance pays some standard rate for standard medical services. You pay the difference, (if one), or buy private insurance to cover it.

3. Doctors and hospitals must accept whatever government insurance pays for welfare recipients and must share the load equally.

I realize this is brief and simplistic.  I've seen enough articles on TV to realize that there are lots people that are absolute wizards at screwing the public in the name of health care.  I'll have to get some help on this.

Another thing I believe in is a return to the testing of potential married couples for syphilis, aids, and those new incurable strains of TB.

Since most TB is curable but on the rise again in America, I advocate some method of coercing those with TB or any other highly contagious disease for which there is a known cure, to stay put and take their medicine until they get well.