I'm glad I'm not in politics, because then I can sit here at my computer and come up with sensible solutions to funding our nation's health care needs--without having to answer to the hordes of well-funded lobbyists from pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies.
So here are a few places where I would go first, to find money:
--The easiest and most obvious one is to change the tax structure. Forget going after the top CEO salaries--yes, they're obscene, but if we reduced them all to zero, we wouldn't even begin to raise the sums we need. We need to substantially raise the taxes of very wealthy people. Obama is going there now, but I wish he could go further, and faster.
--Then I would let a whole lot of people out of prison--or never put them in there, in the first place. There are surely violent, anti-social people who need to be locked up. But there are too many people populating our prisons who could pay their debt to society in some other way than doing jail time. Many might even conceivable be rehabilitated, if we actually tried to do that, which we don't. The U.S. incarcerates people at nearly 5 times the world average, as Nicholas Kristof recently pointed out (NY Times, 8/20/09), And California spends $216,000 annually on each inmate in the juvenile justice system, but spends only $8,000 on each child in the Oakland public school system. What is wrong with this picture?
--And third, there's the obesity factor. Our kids (nevermind the adults who can't fit into airplane seats or into caskets) are getting to be real fatties, which is a major health issue. And soft drinks are the biggest culprit of all, I'm given to understand. So why are we selling soft drinks so cheaply? We should add a fat tax on every soft drink sold and use all that money for health care.
In fact, if we made all these changes, we'd probably take care of the health care crisis and have enough money left over to solve global warming. We wouldn't even have to stop spending billions of dollars on foreign wars--which, in truth, would be my very first choice of a smart cost-cutting measure. But, hey, I'm trying not to dream too big.
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