The health care debate thread.

[mUUser]

As a country we need to get over this notion of a single bill that is going to fix things in one fell swoop. We'd be a lot smarter to pass a bunch of individual smaller bills that address individual problems and then it will be easier to tweak things going forward......

Obamacare was doomed from day one. There's not a single organization in the world, public or private, that can write a bill or policy that stands 8 feet tall that would make any sense at all. It was a single party bill. It wasn't understood by anyone that voted for it. In fact, I'm not certain a single member of congress had read it front to back, much less understood what he/she was voting for.

You are exactly right. This needs to be taken in tiny chunks. Start with the five or six provisions everyone can agree on, then monitor the unintended consequences of it, then move to improve it. Something as monstrous as health care legislation might even take a generation to get anywhere near "right."

[sancho]

Obamacare was doomed from day one. There's not a single organization in the world, public or private, that can write a bill or policy that stands 8 feet tall that would make any sense at all. It was a single party bill. It wasn't understood by anyone that voted for it. In fact, I'm not certain a single member of congress had read it front to back, much less understood what he/she was voting for.

You are exactly right. This needs to be taken in tiny chunks. Start with the five or six provisions everyone can agree on, then monitor the unintended consequences of it, then move to improve it. Something as monstrous as health care legislation might even take a generation to get anywhere near "right."

I think there's a catch-22. If a bill is 800 pages long, no one will read it, but its lack of transparency makes it passable. If an important bill is simple enough to be understood, it has almost no chance of passing. The "five or six provisions everyone can agree on" don't exist.

Rocker's first item - tort reform. People agree this is needed, but there is no agreement as to how it should be done. No way any simple bill on tort reform gets through. The most wealthy and powerful lobbies in Washington (and therefore our elected representatives) would skewer it. Most of the little necessary fixes have a huge uphill battle.