Sometimes you gotta do it yourself.   Who among us has not heard a frustrated parent, teacher, or boss utter that old adage.  These are exactly my feelings on the bogus healthcare debate.  Bogus?  Yes, none of the previous calls for truth in debate have been addressed by the lead mouthpieces in this excuse of an issue.  So I've had it. I'm gonna lay out the cure for this debacle and be done with it.   

First we start out by revisiting the Heartland Murmurs axiom:
It's not that it's too complicated to fix, it's that it's fixed to look too complicated.
 
Other than the galactic scope of the proposed solutions the healthcare issue is no different than any other in Washington DC; one side is trying to finagle a way to expand and retain power while the other is trying to recapture it, both by showering gobs and gobs of current and future tax money on their pet constituencies (unions, trial lawyers on one side, pharma, insurance on the other).     

Anyway, if you disagree with that premise or find it too cynical you are in the wrong place, so go away.  This blog is for the reality based. 

It is widely accepted that the first step in problem solving is to properly define it. That said, and to keep it real simple in adherence to the aforementioned axiom, I submit the problem is this: 30 million U.S. citizens lack health insurance.  That number is overly generous by my reckoning explained in a previous post:  A Dose of Truth Would Be Best Medicine on Health Care Debate  which has since been verified repeatedly, for example: 

90 percent of Americans are already insured -- and well over half the rest can get insurance if they so choose.   -  NY Post

Obama himself used the 30 million figure in his address to congress, you remember, the one where a bunch of Southern politicians kept yelling "get a rope!"  They didn't ?  Sorry, my bad.  Must have misheard a Jimmy Carter interview or misread a Maureen Dowd column.  But I digress...

Average cost of individual health insurance per year: $4000.00
source: Bureau of Labor 

Stay with me here...

Set aside (hey here's an idea, use the Social Security lock box, no one else is.)  $200,000 per each uninsured in a government guaranteed interest bearing account of 2%. 

So, unless they changed it 2%, just 2%! of $200,000 is $4,000 and viola! we just covered the annual insurance costs for one uninsured individual.   

Extrapolate and it works out like this:
$200,000 x 30 million uninsured = $120 billion.

Yeah, it's a lotta lute but still, it's only 2 years worth of Medicare fraud losses and mere pocket change compared to the trillions being discussed in congress.  This plan is funded in a lump some ONCE.   Thereafter the governments only obligation is to guarantee the 2% return.  Since the taxpayers own so much of Wall Street these days, I am sure we can find a deal up there, wink wink, nudge, nudge, an arm twist here, a strategically placed horses head there. The Chicago gang can be very persuasive.

Subsequent fraud savings can be applied to a medical mistake compensation pool, if on the off chance they actually acknowledge our malpractice legal lotto scam contributes to the problem, but that's another issue for another day. 

So that's the cure in a nut shell.  Insures 30 million at roughly one eighth the cost without co-opting 17% of the economy.  

Public option? We don't need no stinkin public option.  Loosen up trade barriers and boundaries of insurers, sit back and watch prices plummet due to increased supply.  Works every time to you let it, and as frustrating as it is to control-freak statists, the laws of economics are not subject to amendments, and as such beyond the grasp of power grabbers, not that it keeps them from trying. 

Besides, the government offering a public option is like if the NFL giving a team franchise to the NFL umpires union while expecting we'd believe their team wouldn't get favorable calls on the field.  Yeah right.  Wouldn't take long for the whole league to turn to crap, which is precisely what some are claiming the Democrats are trying to do to the insurance companies. The best way to punish them is to erase their geographic monopolies and make them compete. (see econ 101 lesson above)  

I have said before that selling the nation, let alone his own party, on the idea that spending a trillion dollars to solve a 120 billion dollar problem would make Obama the best salesmen in all recorded history.  I am just a stay at home Dad, armchair economist and political pundit, but I came up with a plan.  The point is there are many viable plans that can actually solve the problem, properly defined.