August Fogs

I awoke this morning to the most August of all events locally, a heavy fog. The hot days coupled with the longer nights and the prevailing August weather pattern of southern winds creates this yearly ritual that only the cooler days of September will bring to an end.

Some people say that you can count the snows of the coming winter by counting the fogs of August. I have tried this and it has not worked for me yet. But, I am but man and in my brief span the law of averages may simply have not revealed this truth.
The fogs of August have been given new meaning this year as the country tries to decide what to do about its healthcare problem. Make no mistake, it is a problem that we will deal with within the next ten years or we will become a second rate nation.

But, do not look forward , look backward only ten short years and remember when your health insurance paid for a lot more care but cost less than half as much as it cost you now. Remember when insurance companies did not block coverage and cancel policies of sick people.

But, each morning, as surely as the fog settles in, the fog of false claims resound in every form of media. The vested interests in the healthcare related industries are so distorting the discussion that the fog becomes even more thick, cutting off the best efforts of some to bring this discussion to some resolution.

My position on this issue is simple, we must, for the sake of our children and all posterity, find ways to bring down the cost of healthcare and make it more available to all who have need of it. Whether that is done within the present framework, or some new framework is built, is of no consequence to me.

But, here is a fact. If you have insurance, you are paying for 130% of the cost of your healthcare plus a 20% addon for the insurance companies. As a businessman, how I would love to create a system where people bought draperies through some system where I was paid 130% of my normal charges. I would fight tooth and nail to keep that system in place if I felt it threatened.

If I owned a hospital, able to create this big of a corruption in the system rather than restructure my business to accommodate reality, I would demonize, marginalize, socialize, nazi-ize, and generally pulverize anyone who attempted to bring a halt to my unholy conduct.

That approximate 140% payment for the cost of healthcare by the companies of this country that pay for the healthcare of their employees is a big part of the reason that we ship jobs all over the world. Companies search for the lowest costs in everything they do but are saddled with this budget buster beyond their control. The result is that everything that you buy in many stores is make somewhere else in the world.

I compliment the Obama Administration for being willing to stand in the middle of this firestorm and tackle this question. Whomever did it was going to be pummeled from every side as President Bush found out when he tried to attack the Social Security problems.

Mother Nature crates the fogs of August to tell us that the summer is coming to a close. The healthcare industries and political antagonists create their version of the fogs of August to protect their pieces of turf, their interests. One will lift later in the morning and find us going about our routines. The artificial fog will not be so kind, for it will leave us lesser people.