Starting over on health care reform

So, the lot has been cast, the balance has changed, and we must start over. This is a good thing. Let us now look at our health care mess, not as the open mouths of baby birds that we are trying to satiate by shoving a huge ball of worms down their throats, but as the knotted mess it is. The answer to starting over is to untangle, isolate the issues and address problems within the realm of each problem - financial assistance, business practices, non-profit characteristics - and not the way too big a project to control "health care." Even on the most basic level, health wellness issues and health healing from sickness issues are two very different things that need to be addressed separately for clarity. We failed to solve the business of health care as a unified whole, but I would offer that the reason is that we were actually addressing too little, and not too much. By aiming to assign a price tag and method to the whole problem, we were treating health care like it is a business to be tended. But it is not. Health care is an element of life, a problem of the individual and collective in multiple ways. It is not mearly business as Marley responds to Scrooge: 'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!' The health care initiative rebellion was because the people see that far too much is involved to simply assign this to a governmental business plan. Like the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, we won't let charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence be put on the shelf with the listed treasures. Let the government attend to its drop of water in structures and allow the rest of us to be free to deal with the common welfare.