Now that everyone is talking about Tiger. . .

Now that the hysterics about health care have quieted down while newspeople pontificate on the issue of Tiger Woods and his alleged girl friends I thought I would discuss healthcare reform.

In 1896 Henry Ford completed his first automobile known as the "Quadricycle." It had a chain drive, a two gear transmission and had a top speed of 20 mph. It was basically a buggy with a motor and a tiller to steer with. It didn't have heated leather seats, windows or doors, didn't need a sun / moon roof since there wasn't a roof, had no radio, heater, air conditioning or cup holders and the fuel tank was under the seat.
It wasn't very comfortable, efficient or safe. Through a series of partners, investors and advice givers like Thomas Edison, Ford maintained his vision of an inexpensive automobile. Today our cars have everything the Quadricycle didn't have and more. Ford's idea was simple, make an automobile people could afford and pay his workers enough money that they could afford it.

The history of human invention has followed a simple path: people invent something which doesn't work all that well and is difficult to use. People adapt to using the new invention and then, over time, they adapt the invention to fit themselves. Cars didn't have cup holders until recently — and Europeans still don't quite understand them. We now look at things like GPS systems, heated seats, defrosters and the like as necessities. But they weren't there to begin with. If someone had stopped Ford from producing the Quadricycle and his later cars because of the cost, the difficulty, public objection, lack of a roof or anything else we probably wouldn't have automobiles at all.
One of the primary considerations in designing anything is whether it would be better to wait for newer and better methods, materials and technology. Yet we don't do that, we don't wait. Taking the first step in developing something, no matter how flawed or incomplete, is the first step to the final product. You can't make things better by waiting for them to get better or by keeping things the way they are until they somehow get better or even trying to fix problems that may or may not exist. You develop the thing, then see what needs to and can be done to improve it. If you keep trying to make improvements to something before it's finished, it won't get finished because it can always be improved.

The situation is the same with health care reform. Politicians should pass what they can and come back to fix any problems or correct any flaws in the future instead of arguing about what the flaws and problems might be. They don't have crystal balls to consult and they can't foretell the future. We should demand that healthcare reform be passed in whatever form it currently exists. Over time we will fix it as it needs to be fixed since no matter what healthcare bill is passed it will require future changes to make it better. This is what we have been doing in this country for several hundred years, making things better as best we could. So far it has worked pretty well and no one has come up with a better way of doing it. Our founding fathers understood this when they created the United States Constitution, a unique and difficult document that had no real precedent. They were working from scratch to develop a vision which even they knew they could not deliver. They created a plan and I doubt that any of them came away satisfied with the result, but they provided for ways to change it and improve it. Thomas Jefferson even recommended that the constitution be completely revised in the future because he saw that it would need to be changed.

We can't make health care reform work until we have some sort of health care reform to work with. The alternative to passing health care reform now is everyone sitting on their hands complaining about health care until their insurance company — if they manage to have one — cuts off their benefits.