I am appalled at the lack of civility at some of these meetings. The incident at the Barney Frank town hall meeting got national coverage and I think his comments to the abusive questions of the lady were right on.

I don't think that the American public knows the specfic points in the plan.

The plan is complicated, but these are the major points:

The 8 principles of Obama's health plan are to:

1. Speed up use of electronic health records and information technology.

2. Support more research into comparing treatments so doctors and patients have better information on what works best.

3. Double research on cancer, including a 6 billion injection at the National Institutues of Health.

4. Improve services for American Indians and Alaskan Natives.

5. Recruit more health professionals, including 330 million dollars for more doctors, nurses and dentists in regions of shortage.

6. Expand child care such as Early Head Start and Head Start and create Nurse Home Visitation to support first time mothers.

7. Strengthen quality and efficiency of Medicare, the government insurance program for seniors.

8. Increase food safety and prevention of foodborne illness by investing over 1 billion dollars for more Food and Drug Administration inspections, labs, and surveillance.

I know there is fear of "Big Brother" in the medical health records aspect of this, but this is a process that has been occurring in the past 10 years within the medical profession as a response to pressure from the insurance industry. The problem I see is the linking of the information to other data bases, for commercial purposes, and I don't know what provisions are being made to keep a patient's information private.

I believe that most of the other proposals are reasonable.

However, I am also concerned about the spend, spend, spend trend. There appears to be no aim to provide income for the spending programs.
Source(s):
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140494.php


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