When Healthcare is Fixed for Small Business, It’s Fixed for America
As our leaders look to revive the flat-lined 2007 "Year of Healthcare", it is important to remember that small business owners, employees, and family members make up 60 percent of the uninsured, so until healthcare is fixed for small business it is not "fixed". But what does truly "fixed" health care look like for California’s job creators?
NFIB has put forth ten principles for small business healthcare reform which include:
- Universal: All Americans should have access to quality care and protection against catastrophic costs. A government safety net should enable the neediest to obtain coverage.
- Private: To the greatest extent possible, Americans should receive their health insurance and healthcare through the private sector. Care must be taken to minimize the extent to which government safety nets crowd out private insurance and care.
- Affordable: Healthcare costs to individuals, providers, governments, and businesses must be reasonable, predictable and controllable.
Taking a Good Hard Look in the Mirror
There’s an old saying about the weather. Everybody talks about it but nobody ever seems to do anything about it. The same can be said about the price of gasoline. And while the pain at the pump continues, everyone is looking for scapegoats to blame for high gasoline prices.
Number one on the list are the "greedy" oil companies and their "windfall profits", followed by the Saudis and their fellow travelers at OPEC, China and India for daring to prosper and thus increasing demand, and a whole host of other things. All convenient, but something is missing.
The one thing we always leave out is ourselves.
Now before you start heating up the tar, gathering the feathers and looking for a rail to run me out of town on, hear me out.
Lesson One in the Initiative Game Playbook
If you are trying to defeat an initiative measure destined
for the ballot, lesson one in the initiative game playbook is to cause
confusion and uncertainty with the voters. One of the chief weapons to
accomplish this goal is to file a rival measure of your own on the same
subject. If both measures qualify for the ballot, the voters will have the extra
task of not only trying to decide if a reform is needed, but also which reform is the
best one to solve the problem the measures are intended to address.
Once the campaign attacks start flying on the supposed
hidden agendas or flaws in the rival measures, the voters often throw up their
hands in disgust and vote NO on both entries. That is often an acceptable
result for the supporters of the second measure. They don’t want Measure A to
pass. If Measure B, their own initiative, goes down in the process, they will
accept that collateral damage because their first priority is to defeat Measure
A.
Civic Engagement?
"Cut Welfare, public housing and job programs. I’m tired of paying for worthless lazy scum bags who spread theirs legs and make us pay for their kids."
That’s "Sandwich8’s" thoughts on the budget. Not something regrettably leaked from a private email, but a comment purposely posted to a public website.
Whether it’s an article on the budget crisis, the lottery, health care, retirement income, or an increase in California’s teen birth rate, we need all Californians to think about real ideas and embrace genuine solutions to the state’s problems. Here are some alternatives to the prevailing themes that most readers of California’s newspapers and blogs embrace in their online comments: