Universal Healthcare: Evidence of a Desperate Nation or Impulsive Leadership? The solution is in restoration of key virtues & sound principles

A recent poll on Facebook asks whether the member is for or against the Universal Healthcare Plan supported by President Obama. In response: Let me use the wise words of my youngest daughter (a young adult): "heck no, techno!"

In words that Obama and his administration can understand--and any legislators who may think we are backed into a corner: We are not a desperate nation. We do not need to resort to this manipulation to "solve" our problems today to make them worse in the future.

Patience, a virtue needing as much restoration as the Constitution itself, is the answer: We don't need impulsive pen scribbles on legislation that will cripple our nation.

We need private policies to flourish. Specifically, eliminating the (HMO) middle man, a basic economics principle, in reducing costs to consumers will allow doctors to negotiate with patients a sliding scale fee like the old days where patients paid as they went and catastrophic insurance was the only "health insurance" available.

Current FDA criteria is two-fold. A drug must be tested for a period of time in double blind testing for safety, usually on rats or other "spare" animals. Once that testing passes standards of safety, clinical trials for effectiveness begin, requiring many years of study and documentation and funding. Reducing the FDA criteria for testing Rx's, allowing doctors to prescribe directly to patients drugs without trials for effectiveness, allows years off the arduous and expensive clinical trials required. In reality, docs already use this method of "testing" meds with patients--and have been for years--prescribing a drug for something other than what it was originally intended. For instance, Rogaine was originally a heart medication in pill form. But dermatologists, knowing of its potency for hair restoration would grind the pill into powder, and mix it in an alcohol base to prescribe it to patients as a topical treatment for baldness. Why not extend this practice to drugs not jet on the market, that have been tested for safety, (the one trial FDA should continue) but allow doctors to test effectiveness among their patients who want to try the drug. Who would, and should a patient trust more, their doctor or the FDA? This bureaucratic policy change would literally shave millions, perhaps billions, off the expense of medications--an ever increasing drain for most American households.

A medical co-op plan put together by the private sector may be the viable solution for many who need the "bulk rate" of many pooled together for their personal risks to go down. Unlike the scams of insurance, which, by the way, is the# 1 primary market for investments, (meaning they are a financial entity, not a service, as most of us believe) a co-op is a direct shared expense for only health costs with little to no overhead and no hidden agenda. (Imagine that.)

Universal Healthcare? Absolutely not.

Universal anything? Never: the very definition is totally un-American.