Saturday, July 11, 2009

Weekly Comments: Will offers health care plan: adoption #559

July 11, 2009

COLUMBUS: T. Boone Pickens is back in the news again. With Congress working on a bill to replace coal with wind and sunshine, Boone cancelled his plans for installing 600 wind machines in West Texas. Now there’s as much wind as ever around Lubbock and Amarillo, and you can’t find a better place to set up gigantic windmills. Only problem is, where they need electricity is East Texas, and nobody has volunteered to pay for the transmission wires.

So Boone is looking for a home for his wind machines. Frankly, a perfect location for half of ‘em is downwind of Washington. You’ve got both the source and the need in the same vicinity. As for the other 300, I’m open to suggestions.

Congress figured out how to pay for health care for 50 million people without insurance: let the rich cover ‘em. According to the plan, any family making over $350,000 will be asked to contribute. The government collects the money, then after taking out the overhead, doles it out to the uninsured whether they want it or not.

I think a simpler plan would be adoption. We have about 1 million who are wealthy enough to be the “payers”, and 50 million “payees.” So I suggest each rich payer kinda adopt 50 payees. Set it up like one of these dating web sites, call it www.healthEharmony.com, and let each of our wealthy select their 50. Maybe some millionaires could adopt 100, like Jay Rockefeller and Warren Buffett (and Boone Pickens if he ever sells his windmills). My plan eliminates the middleman and minimizes the operating cost, assuming we can find someone to build the web site for less than $18 Million, which seems to be the going rate in Washington.

To be fair, the first ones to choose can’t just pick up 50 young, healthy guys who don’t expect to ever see a doctor till they’re at least 80. No, they can take about ten of those, but the other forty are split between the unemployed, those too sick to work, and our so-called undocumented immigrants.

The only problem is gonna come when another 50 million or so see this adoption plan as such a good idea they want in on it. I’m not sure families making, say, $200,000 are going to look favorably on adopting their share.

How’s this for stimulating jobs? General Motors got $20 Billion more from the government, and announced they’re cutting 6000 salaried workers and maybe 20,000 more in factories. At least they’re out of bankruptcy, and they’ll do all right if they can keep running the company from Detroit instead of Washington.

Historic quotes by Will Rogers:
“Everybody says, ‘Where's the money coming from we're spending?’ Well, I don't know, but just offhand, I'd say it's coming from those that got it.... There's one good thing about the American form of government. The fellow that's got nothing, he don't pay nothing.” Radio, April 7, 1935

Randall Reeder is Will Rogers Today
http://willrogerstoday.com willrogers@aol.com
614-477-0439
Need a Speaker? Hurry up and hire me before I die... again.

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