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Recess is Over!

Time to go back to work, good congresspeople.  I hope the earful you got from the American people during your August recess got your attention.  There are a great many topics that need addressing and the way you have been planning to “fix” them needs to be rethought if you give a damn about what your constituents told you.

First, let’s back the train waaaaay up on healthcare.  Any thoughts of ramming your silly government-run healthcare down the American people’s throats should be long gone.  You want competition, choice and reduced healthcare costs?  Let me get you started on a much more reasonable bill.  Feel free to use all of these ideas:

1. Allow Americans to buy health insurance across state lines.  This will provide you all the competition you want as there will immediately be over 1,300 insurance plans competing for the consumer’s business.
2. Make healthcare insurance premiums tax-deductible.  This would allow many more folks to purchase healthcare insurance creating more coverage.  You could even give the American people an advance on the deduction (ie. tax credit check in the mail) so they can get the insurance now.
3. Loosen the eligibility criteria for  Medicare and Medicaid.  We already have government programs to help the poor and the elderly with healthcare so broadening the eligibility criteria could allow many of the 10-15 million who TRULY can not get health insurance the ability to get in.
4. Ensure that health insurance is portable between jobs.  Moving forward this would close the pre-existing condition loophole that exist today when people who get a serious illness while under their current employer’s plan could be tagged as having a pre-existing condition if they switch jobs and try to get insurance under their new employer’s plan.
5. TORT REFORM!  Likely needs to be its own bill, but the surest way to reduce medical costs is to put some common sense into the medical malpractice industry.  Outrageous legal suits from patients and lawyers looking to get princely sums have driven the cost of carrying medical malpractice insurance sky-high for doctors and hospitals and guess who gets that cost passed on to them? The patients.

Those five should get you started and I promise you, the American people will cheer your name if you embrace these type of ideas as a way to improve the healthcare system in this country.

Next, Cap-and-Trade must die.  Hopefully, smarter heads will prevail in the Senate and you folks will not pass anything close to that monstrous load of tax crap that passed in the House.  Study after study shows that what the House passed will have no (none, nada, zippo) appreciable positive impact on the environment over the next 100 years, but it sure will have a huge negative impact on middle America by creating higher rates on every form of energy we use today – electricity and gas being the biggest.

Take steps to correct your course on the above two issues and America will likely get off your back.  Yes, I understand there are issues on the foreign policy front right now as well, but Americans are hoping mad about the domestic policies being proposed so you would do well to heed the message you got from them during recess.

Play time is over now. Get back to work for the American people.