Why not have a lot of meetings with health care providers, administrators, pharmacists, business owners and health care consumers from all over the country? Ask them what they think are the most important health care needs that should be provided for. Ask them what their worst frustrations with health insurance are. Talk to those people a lot for a year or a couple of years, and craft the government's response.
What about having a website where Americans can tell the government what their concerns about health care are, and also spending those couple of years reading what they say before deciding what to do?
I think that many of the people who are contacting their legislators about health care are probably panicked by the media frenzy. If the government solicits Americans to ask them what their specific health care concerns are, that at least will reduce some of the media's power to portray the government as being uncaring.
A government that prioritizes fiscal responsibility is not the sign of a government that doesn't care. Figuring out how the money should and shouldn't be spent should be as collaborative as possible.
This is perhaps a crazy idea, but I can say it because I'm not a professional political writer; healthy food will never have the advertising money that unhealthy food has. The healthiest produce has to be its own advertising, mostly because nobody has had to improve it for thousands of years. Since that's so, has anyone ever thought of offering people a moderate tax deduction if they send receipts to the IRS at tax time that prove that they have spent at least a quarter of their food dollars on fruit and vegetables?
What about also having tax deductions for gym memberships?
That's the address of the first page of Yahoo results for "cost of obesity epidemic."
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, July 19, 2017 @ 10:30 a.m.
