Just about everyone has heard the story about a tractor trailer being caught in a tunnel. How engineers and experts from all around were called in to solve the issue, but in the end, the solution came from a little boy that simply said “let the air out of the tires.” It’s a cute story – one that makes people remember at least for a moment that sometimes the answer to a problem is really very simple.
During the last administration, there was railing against a huge program that was meant to radically improve the performance of students in this country. Most of the complaints came from teachers’ unions, bemoaning the increase in work load thanks to paperwork, and radical changes in curriculum. They warned they would be left with “teaching to the tests” – they were right. But there was one group of relatively quiet voices crying for the one thing that had the best hope of truly improving our educational system – they wanted increased national standards for colleges and universities in their Education programs. As it is, there really aren’t national standards for teachers to this day – there are performance standards based on the performance of their students, but no basic requirements that every post-secondary institution must require of students wishing to become teachers in the first place. So here we are, wondering why we aren’t seeing great improvements in academics nationwide, while doing the same thing we’ve been doing for years. (Isn’t there an adage about the insanity of expecting different results from the same actions?) If only that little quiet group had been a bit louder, and suggested that the solution was much easier than what was already on the table. It’s not like it doesn’t make sense – if you have better teachers, you’ll have better students, right?
Now, we have a new administration hell bent on fixing health care. They managed to pass a law and everything. Of course, they had to pass it before anyone could honestly understand everything that was in it. Before the bill was passed, there was already something that was the same in our health care system no matter where you went in this country. Every health care provider and insurance company in the nation uses the same system for recording everything – all ailments and treatments use the same codes no matter where you are. That may not seem very important all by itself, but it is meaningful. Because of that, the only difference between the various insurance companies’ paperwork is the name of the company on the letterhead.
So, if one would decide “hey, why don’t we make it possible for all insurance companies to do business anywhere they like in the U.S.”, it wouldn’t be very difficult. To protect the public from predatory practices by the industry, one would only have to make a list of basic standards all companies would have to meet. And one very important thing that would need to be in that list would be a rule against insurance companies refusing to pay for economical solutions doctors come up with for people’s problems. Like no one would be screaming over the fact that a flat-footed child could not have inserts for his shoes in an attempt to cure his condition – insurance companies couldn’t tell doctors that they must opt for expensive surgeries in cases like that. That example is a very crude summation of our current problems with health care after all. Insurance companies are controlling the system, not health care providers. Accountants are telling doctors what to do. Bureaucracy. So the solution, according to this administration, is to make more bureaucracy?
Of course that alone would not necessarily make health care affordable for all. Perhaps we could take a page from the book of the insurance companies on this one. Maybe we could do away with insurance groups as we know them. We all understand that a company with thousands of employees pays less per person for insurance than one with just hundreds of employees. How about basing premiums on the number of individuals a given insurance company handles? Throw in the ability for companies to compete across state lines for business, and offering incentives to the public for keeping savings accounts for health care expenses, and maybe we’d have something. But the problem is, it wouldn’t be controlled by the government beyond insurance companies being fined – or shut down in extreme cases – for not meeting those minimum national standards.
Common sense relies on finding the simplest solution to a given problem. We have moved well beyond the point where common sense is anything but a joke to elected officials. All of the solutions offered above have probably been mentioned by others along the way. But they have also been mentioned by children. Contrary to what many may think, children are not stupid – they are just more simplistic. When they attack a problem, they don’t tend to take the long way around – nor do they take into account questionable situations like crafting an answer in a way that benefits them the most (unless you are talking about conning the latest video game out of a grandparent, of course.) As we age, we forget that simplicity, and particularly in the world of politics and government, that works to our disadvantage. We start from the most complex solutions first, and if we’re smart enough to realize our folly, we go back and simplify. (That’s assuming that we get anywhere in the first place, since we’re so enamored with infighting.) Perhaps the real change we need to look for is people that attack problems like children – identify the problem, identify the desired result, and then figure out the easiest way to reach that outcome. Parents often call it “taking the easy way out”, but in government, it should be called “not creating bureaucracies to justify the existence of our own jobs.”
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