Many people want you to believe that healthcare reform is much more difficult and complicated than it actually is. They want you to believe that so that the people who benefit from our current complicated insurance system continue to benefit. The fact is, though, that we already have a system in place that can cover everyone and greatly simplify healthcare in our country, and that system is called Medicare.
What I will do will be to expand Medicare to include everyone in the country who chooses to be included. This will be a huge blow to insurance companies that earn billions of dollars through health insurance premiums, but what's more important--that people in our country have full access to healthcare no matter how much they earn, or that wealthy corporations continue to add to their wealth? To me, this is not even debatable--the human beings are much more important.
It's a shame that the issue of healthcare has become a financial issue rather than a medical one. Only in America, right? By expanding Medicare, we will take advantage of systems already in place and be able to fully and clearly administer a program that will help everyone.
This isn't going to be cheap, but that's not what's important. It's also not going to be nearly as expensive as the doom-sayers want us to believe it will be. When people start inverting money that now goes to private insurers into the Medicare system, the system will be healthy. And people will be paying less than they're paying now, so they'll have more money to afford things like rent and food and child care, more money to invert into the economy to help keep businesses in other fields afloat.
Doctors and PA's and other healthcare professionals also will benefit. Within the system, their administrative costs will drop significantly as they no longer have to deal with a multitude of insurance companies and a bewildering range of what's covered and what isn't. Billing will be simpler, malpractice insurance will be cheaper, and their patients should, all in all, be much healthier as they stop avoiding those expensive trips to the doctor.
Fewer people will have to miss work because of illnesses they can't get treated; we will see a fall in the number of people who die needlessly because they delayed that visit to the doctor because they couldn't afford it.
Providing healthcare to an entire nation of people isn't just an exercise in compassion and empathy--it makes complete sense economically and socially. When we have a healthier populace, we have a more productive country; when we don't have people going bankrupt to pay medical bills, we have a stronger society in general. Most importantly, the healthy won't be paying nearly as much to support those who aren't healthy--currently, "analysis of health care spending shows that: Five percent of the population accounts for almost half (49 percent) of total health care expenses" (https://archive.ahrq.gov/research/findings/factsheets/costs/expriach/).
When we fix the system, the amount that each person spends will drop significantly. This disparity of the five percent accounting for half the expenses will continue, of course--treating cancer is an expensive proposition that doesn't affect everyone--but the costs can be absorbed in a much more practical way than the current system of raising everyone's insurance rates to pay for those who need expensive procedures.
I recently read an article about a community coming together to help to raise money for a school principal's battle against cancer. This should not have to happen in our wealthy country--a health issue should be covered for everyone, and the community can spend its money in other, more practical ways.
We have a system in place that has proved to be effective over a long period of time. Rather than re-inventing a system, let's simply expand the one that works. Over a period of two years, we will sign everyone up for this system who wants to be covered in it, and though it will cost some money, it will cost the average American less than the current system and it will cover many more people.
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Education: Our Greatest Need
The highest priority of my platform will be education, for from an effective education spring all good things. An uneducated populace is one that costs more money to maintain, that is less willing and able to protect the planet and participate in and contribute to the economy, and that costs us much more on things like health care, police forces, and many of our other significant problems that we deal with daily.
The first priority will be to do away with testing. Through testing we have put a huge financial burden on American taxpayers that when all is said and done shows absolutely no significant return. So a student scores an 80% on a standardized test while he or she is in the tenth grade--so what? This is not an effective predictor of the student's future performance, nor is it an accurate indicator of the effectiveness of that student's teachers or the curriculum of his or her school. We need to stop paying millions of dollars a year for something that gives no valuable return at all.
What we need to do instead is return the control of the schools to the districts, and we need to make the jobs of principals and superintendents much more accountable. We also need to raise their salaries so that we attract a high quality of person to those jobs--many of those jobs are filled by people who are underqualified or completely unqualified to do them, simply because they happened to be in the right place at the right time and the district happened to be looking for someone.
We also need to revamp our educational system so that the education that our young people receive is practical and relevant. We need to bring back shop classes, home ec classes (though we'll want to rename them!), and personal finance classes. No one should be admitted into high school who doesn't know how to balance a checkbook and budget for household expenses. Period. Students need to understand how taxes work, how health care works, how a sink and running water work, and how a sewer system works. We have raised a couple of generations of people who don't understand much of this basic information, and we've paid a huge price for that ignorance in the form of expenditures to fix problems caused by ignorance and stupidity. Ask anyone in Flint, Michigan, about the dangers of not understanding how a city's water supply is attained, stored, and distributed. Our entire infrastructure is in danger of failing on a catastrophic level, and much of the reason for that is the fact that most Americans don't understand exactly what the problems are and what needs to be done to fix those problems.
An educated populace also can make better decisions when voting. An educated person will be able to hear a fallacious argument and think, "Wait a minute--something's wrong with what she just said," rather than cheering mightily for lie after lie just because it sounds good. With a well-educated populace, we'll face fewer problems in our health care system because people will understand how to take care of themselves, and they'll be able to recognize and identify potential problems and dangers in their actions.
This is not to mention the benefits of growth and innovation that will come when our students are educated more strongly and more effectively. Many companies are desperate for people who can do the jobs they need done, and who can do them not just well, but exceptionally. In America now, many companies need to spend precious time and money giving their new hires special training to make up for the shortcomings in education that they bring with them. This should never have to happen, but it's become quite common.
We have a bigger problem than skilled labor, too--the problem of skilled middle-management. We have very few people who are true leaders moving into leadership positions, and they bring with them paranoia, insecurity, and fear that they'll fail, which cause them to be extremely ineffective at their jobs, which leads to loss of workers at lower levels, lower performance on the part of almost everyone, and very poor growth for many companies.
As I mentioned, the first part of my education reform would include returning control of the schools to the districts. The national government should function in an advisory capacity, creating resources for schools to use rather than trying to control the schools by controlling their finances.
Second, starting at the high school level, all students should be able to specialize in at least two fields that interest them. Why should a student who wants to be an engineer take four years of Language Arts? Four years of history or social studies? If we strengthen the curriculum of social studies courses, we can deliver the same amount of information in two years by making it more relevant to today's world, and the students can spend the time they would be in those classes studying more courses that will help them in their futures.
Our students could be leaving high school at near-expert levels in one or two important fields and strong base knowledge in several others. Now, though, they tend to leave with basic or just-above-basic knowledge in many subjects that will be irrelevant to them the day after they finish school.
We need to build more schools that are smaller and more streamlined, and get away from our huge schools that allow so many students to slip through the cracks. If we can do this, we can follow the model of some other countries in which teachers are hired by districts, not by schools, and they can give their classes in two or three smaller schools per week, as the schools won't be spread nearly as far apart. While there will be some adjustments and growing pains in this model, allowing students to attend smaller schools will allow for much more opportunity for personal growth and development.
And we need to pay teachers much more than they earn now, by the way, and allow them to do their jobs without adding tons of administrative layers to the work that they do, which keep them from focusing on their students and their subjects.
As we rewrite the tax code, we must write in guaranteed funding for all schools, obviously with provisions for dealing with schools that are providing poor educational opportunities for their students.
The first priority will be to do away with testing. Through testing we have put a huge financial burden on American taxpayers that when all is said and done shows absolutely no significant return. So a student scores an 80% on a standardized test while he or she is in the tenth grade--so what? This is not an effective predictor of the student's future performance, nor is it an accurate indicator of the effectiveness of that student's teachers or the curriculum of his or her school. We need to stop paying millions of dollars a year for something that gives no valuable return at all.
What we need to do instead is return the control of the schools to the districts, and we need to make the jobs of principals and superintendents much more accountable. We also need to raise their salaries so that we attract a high quality of person to those jobs--many of those jobs are filled by people who are underqualified or completely unqualified to do them, simply because they happened to be in the right place at the right time and the district happened to be looking for someone.
We also need to revamp our educational system so that the education that our young people receive is practical and relevant. We need to bring back shop classes, home ec classes (though we'll want to rename them!), and personal finance classes. No one should be admitted into high school who doesn't know how to balance a checkbook and budget for household expenses. Period. Students need to understand how taxes work, how health care works, how a sink and running water work, and how a sewer system works. We have raised a couple of generations of people who don't understand much of this basic information, and we've paid a huge price for that ignorance in the form of expenditures to fix problems caused by ignorance and stupidity. Ask anyone in Flint, Michigan, about the dangers of not understanding how a city's water supply is attained, stored, and distributed. Our entire infrastructure is in danger of failing on a catastrophic level, and much of the reason for that is the fact that most Americans don't understand exactly what the problems are and what needs to be done to fix those problems.
An educated populace also can make better decisions when voting. An educated person will be able to hear a fallacious argument and think, "Wait a minute--something's wrong with what she just said," rather than cheering mightily for lie after lie just because it sounds good. With a well-educated populace, we'll face fewer problems in our health care system because people will understand how to take care of themselves, and they'll be able to recognize and identify potential problems and dangers in their actions.
This is not to mention the benefits of growth and innovation that will come when our students are educated more strongly and more effectively. Many companies are desperate for people who can do the jobs they need done, and who can do them not just well, but exceptionally. In America now, many companies need to spend precious time and money giving their new hires special training to make up for the shortcomings in education that they bring with them. This should never have to happen, but it's become quite common.
We have a bigger problem than skilled labor, too--the problem of skilled middle-management. We have very few people who are true leaders moving into leadership positions, and they bring with them paranoia, insecurity, and fear that they'll fail, which cause them to be extremely ineffective at their jobs, which leads to loss of workers at lower levels, lower performance on the part of almost everyone, and very poor growth for many companies.
As I mentioned, the first part of my education reform would include returning control of the schools to the districts. The national government should function in an advisory capacity, creating resources for schools to use rather than trying to control the schools by controlling their finances.
Second, starting at the high school level, all students should be able to specialize in at least two fields that interest them. Why should a student who wants to be an engineer take four years of Language Arts? Four years of history or social studies? If we strengthen the curriculum of social studies courses, we can deliver the same amount of information in two years by making it more relevant to today's world, and the students can spend the time they would be in those classes studying more courses that will help them in their futures.
Our students could be leaving high school at near-expert levels in one or two important fields and strong base knowledge in several others. Now, though, they tend to leave with basic or just-above-basic knowledge in many subjects that will be irrelevant to them the day after they finish school.
We need to build more schools that are smaller and more streamlined, and get away from our huge schools that allow so many students to slip through the cracks. If we can do this, we can follow the model of some other countries in which teachers are hired by districts, not by schools, and they can give their classes in two or three smaller schools per week, as the schools won't be spread nearly as far apart. While there will be some adjustments and growing pains in this model, allowing students to attend smaller schools will allow for much more opportunity for personal growth and development.
And we need to pay teachers much more than they earn now, by the way, and allow them to do their jobs without adding tons of administrative layers to the work that they do, which keep them from focusing on their students and their subjects.
As we rewrite the tax code, we must write in guaranteed funding for all schools, obviously with provisions for dealing with schools that are providing poor educational opportunities for their students.
Monday, October 30, 2017
Finished with the Silence
I've been silent for too long. I've watched our country turn into a mess--a horrible tangle of lies and deception and self-interest that threatens to destroy everything that so many people have worked hard to build and maintain for many, many years. Our politicians are no longer public servants--they're for the most part self-serving demagogues who are in place more often through gerrymandering and spending small fortunes on campaigns than they are through the will of the public. Our institutions are becoming more and more discriminating and less and less inclusive. We live in fear these days--we've lost our self-confidence and practicality that used to define America in the eyes of the rest of the world.
It's time to reclaim our country. It's time to reclaim the compassion, the love, the strength--and I mean true strength, not the posturing and manipulative smokescreen that our current "leaders" are using to hide the fact that they're weak and ineffective. It's time to develop strength that comes from the people of the country, not from wealth or influence or cronyism. It's time to stop threatening each other and to return to cooperating with each other, to work to compromise to reach decisions and make policies that help to make our country stronger rather than to work only with our own political parties in order to gain more influence for ourselves.
Over the next several months, I'm going to develop a political platform that is based on the will of the people and that will have one major goal in mind: how to make our country stronger so that our children will be a part of a nation that is kind and compassionate and that is able to compete in a changing world technologically, industrially, and in every other way possible in the fields of education, medicine, charity, human rights, opportunity, and compassion.
We've lost our way. But the road is still there, just waiting for us to step back on it. Over the course of the next few months--the next few years, even--I hope to be providing the groundwork that will allow our country to become once again great rather than mediocre; strong rather than weak; hopeful rather than despairing.
And I want our country to use that greatness and strength to develop a world that our children can be proud of rather than ashamed of, as they live on a planet that is healing rather than dying. It is possible, and there are common-sense steps that we can take to make sure that it does happen.
It's time to reclaim our country. It's time to reclaim the compassion, the love, the strength--and I mean true strength, not the posturing and manipulative smokescreen that our current "leaders" are using to hide the fact that they're weak and ineffective. It's time to develop strength that comes from the people of the country, not from wealth or influence or cronyism. It's time to stop threatening each other and to return to cooperating with each other, to work to compromise to reach decisions and make policies that help to make our country stronger rather than to work only with our own political parties in order to gain more influence for ourselves.
Over the next several months, I'm going to develop a political platform that is based on the will of the people and that will have one major goal in mind: how to make our country stronger so that our children will be a part of a nation that is kind and compassionate and that is able to compete in a changing world technologically, industrially, and in every other way possible in the fields of education, medicine, charity, human rights, opportunity, and compassion.
We've lost our way. But the road is still there, just waiting for us to step back on it. Over the course of the next few months--the next few years, even--I hope to be providing the groundwork that will allow our country to become once again great rather than mediocre; strong rather than weak; hopeful rather than despairing.
And I want our country to use that greatness and strength to develop a world that our children can be proud of rather than ashamed of, as they live on a planet that is healing rather than dying. It is possible, and there are common-sense steps that we can take to make sure that it does happen.
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