American employers and employees obviously have much at stake as we come to terms with the need to provide health care for all of us.
While vested interests, politicians, and media pundits take sides and do their best to sell their solutions, the Talent Centric Blog will try to present the issues free of political persuasion and posturing in a series of posts planned for the coming weeks.
We will offer an overview of the situation, then address the most pressing points, and leave you with a dispassionate resource of information you can use to clarify your thinking, make up your mind, and talk with your friends, colleagues, and elected representatives.
Below is an outline of the points we intend to cover.
1. There is a problem.
Americans spend more on health care than all other prosperous countries and receive incomplete and inferior care, lower life expectancy, and lower birth rate survival.
2. Something needs to change.
Employers and employees face increasing premium costs year after year. Even if we all enjoyed equal or superior health care, at the increasing rates we’re paying, health care will be unaffordable for most, not just some, Americans and their employers.
3. Nobody’s telling all the truth.
Since much of the debate deals with economic predictions, some proponents will make mistakes and fail the accuracy test when they predict the results of one plan or another. But because huge amounts of money are at stake, vested proponents will tell less than “nothing but the truth” or less than the whole story.
As we make our presentation, keep in mind that there is not one health care plan at this point. And just like the various proposals making their way around the halls of Congress and over the media, this series of blog posts will be a work in progress. The topics may change as we learn more and as Congress comes up with one bill to debate, amend, and bring to a vote.
Meanwhile we can attempt to separate fact from fiction and sincere attempts to address the problem from demagoguery. Your comments are welcome now and throughout the series. And now would be the right time to amend the list of topics and offer sources of unbiased information on the health care debate.
[...] an effort to sort out fact from fiction in this series of posts, which began with “Can We Talk About Health Care? Rationally?” I’ve offered some widely accepted numbers arranged in customizable interactive graphs and [...]