Say What?

Health08.org is a fascinating place to visit now and then. It is a website devoted to chronicling the presidential candidates' stances on health issues.

You can find gems like this:

It's time to bring together businesses, the medical community, and members of both parties around a comprehensive solution to this crisis, and it's time to let the drug and insurance industries know that while they'll get a seat at the table, they don't get to buy every chair. -Barak Obama

This sounds pretty nice until you realize who's missing at Obama's table: everyone who needs health care. That would be us. In other words, Obama just wants to switch the power brokers' seats at the table. His vision isn't any different than the status quo because it doesn't include the users of healthcare to have a say in creating the system for it.

Let's have another look at the candidates' statements, shall we?

We're hearing those phrases again; national health care, universal health care, socialized medicine. We're being told that government bureaucrats can take over our entire medical industry -- which by the way is the best and most complex in the world -- and make it better.

It used to be a lot easier to make the case for nationalizing health care before we actually started looking at the countries that have it.

Thompson's stance is the talking outta my ass one. He makes outrageous statements but doesn't have a single fact to support any of his television script assertions. First of all, he implies that national health care, universal healthcare and socialized medicie are one and the same. Wrong, Freddy.

And by the way, how is it that Fred has free campaign advertising courtesy of ABC Radio Networks? I don't believe that candidates are supposed to be able to use their employers as a free campaign forum, but clue me in if I'm wrong.

At any rate, here's what I'd like to learn:

Presidential candidates' health platforms:

• Who receives accessible and affordable healthcare services
• What those services are and what they are not
• Who pays for them?
• Who administers them?
• How are they administered?
• Who provides them?
• Where are they provided?
• Who regulates them? How?
• Who profits?
• How is preventive health care included?
• How do people obtain prescription medication? Who pays? How much do they pay? Who regulates and negotiates payment?
• How is the public's health assured?
• Who controls public health policy and programming? How does it interface with the rest of US health care?
• What role, if any, do employers have in providing health care coverage?
  

Answer these questions, candidates. The one who answers the most questions correctly has my vote.