What we should do as a nation is come together and work out solutions to the many challenges we are facing. Health care is merely one of them; others include a reform of Wall Street, education and immigration reform, and (my favorite) a commitment to becoming energy independent.

What we are getting instead is bipartisan bickering, a media frenzy that feeds on negative energy that in turn divides the nation. As a result, the majority of our leaders and the general public lose their way, their sanity and their dignity by focusing on single issues without putting them into perspective. We get into heated debates on who is right or who is wrong, and by doing so, we forget the real issues that desperately need to be addressed and which deserve well thought-out solutions that are not full of political and economic compromises.

What bothers me about the health care bill is not the fact that we have it, but the way we got it.

The lack of perspective
The big picture is that as a nation we are not healthy, and as a result more and more of our hard-earned money goes toward paying for health care. This in turn will make us less and less competitive as we compete with fitter nations ready to provide products and services at lesser cost because they spend less on being sick. A good way to pay for the bill would be to raise a tax on fast food, which is the main culprit in making us the most obese nation on earth. Before we complain about the cost, we need to compare it with other expenditures and, for example, realize that this bill’s price tag is about the same as what we have spent on the two current wars.

The unwillingness to find thorough answers I’m very disappointed that the current bill looks like a compromise between a beggar and a banker and really missed the opportunity to overhaul the system and make it more efficient (as in less expensive). 

How can I tell? You know that something is not right when the monopolistic health insurance companies are favoring a bill. We missed the opportunity to curb the ability to sue for malpractice; the much- needed tort reform got scrapped. These are just two points that deserved closer scrutiny. I’m sure that there are many more.

I feel it is our moral duty to provide health care access to everyone (indirectly we are already doing that and paying for it), but I don’t like the fact that we added more government spending before putting our financial house in order. I don’t like that we added a bill that is not balanced because it did nothing to make the system less expensive and more efficient. And I don’t like the way we pay for it.

(An example: Entrepreneurs that are providing health care and are taking risks to add new employees will likely be faced with higher insurance premiums).

As long as everything is being done for political partisan gain, as long as we are buying off interest groups or at times whole industries by making compromises and all along lose our civility, how can we remain the greatest nation on earth? Our leadership structure and our political system need to change if we want to stay alive and competitive in a fast changing and challenging world. Without our ability to use the intellectual potential our nation has, we will not be able to turn the challenges into great opportunities and grow to the next level.

Let’s move on and do better the next time!

Blog with Marc Frey at hiltonheadmonthly.com/blogs or e-mail him at mfrey@freymedia.com