Health Reform Summit

The nation as a whole can win but the summit must be extended to allow for a real and public exchange of ideas. After months of discussion this has not yet happened. The media, ever eager to make a soap opera out of Washington discussing polls instead of policy, has thus far presented the public with little pertinent information about health reform.

Months into the debate even Google failed to generate search results that would allow the casual web searcher to find relevant and necessary information about health reform or even the problems it's intended to solve. All this has led to a nation ill equipped to rationally consider the issue.

Unfortunately this isn't the worse of it. The failure of the US education system over the past decades has left much of America without rational decision making skills and the ability to see when they have insufficient information. Thus we're left with politicians positioning themselves for the approval of the uneducated all while dealing with a genuinely difficult issue.

If the president can resist his own political positioning temptations and embarrass the rest of Congress into doing so as well, he could make real progress on health reform while offering a case study for rational decision making.

First there must be agreement on goals. In response to the notion of the Summit Republicans are saying the primary goal should be cost containment. While Obama first seemed to indicate that as his primary goal, in regards to the summit, he emphasized two others as well, helping the uninsured and covering preexisting conditions.

Certainly justice would have us do that for our countrymen but it could easily be framed as a new entitlement. Perhaps a compromise could be put into place whereby the funding of these two initiatives is done not through the federal budget but through nonprofit means or a voluntary "tax". Perhaps systems could be established and marketed so that churches, for example, could purchase insurance or coverage for individuals in need as they choose but at a more competitive rate. This type of compromise on goals would enable steps to be taken to meet Obama's just hopes while not burdening the federal budget thus allowing for the republican leadership to participate on the terms they have stated which aren't unreasonable but simply require charity by free will as opposed to by statute, at least for a first try.

After goals are determined then a mechanism will have to be agreed on how to evaluate proposals. This mechanism will define what is considered evidence to support or contradict a proposal or at the very least will prescribe a structured way to evaluate the credibility and reliability of the information offered for or against any proposal.

Proposals should also be diagrammed to indicate dependencies. For example, specific minimum requirements for a national insurance market presuppose a cross state insurance competition allowance.

Each proposal along with supporting or contradicting arguments should be made available in transcript form online along with a structured way to illicit focused rational commentary on the strength of each piece of evidence or other specific questions.