The contentious debate surrounding health insurance reform dominated the last Congressional session and may have had a significant impact on the recent mid-term elections. While there is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree about the new health insurance law, it is pretty clear that much of the debate was shaped by lack of information or by outright falsehoods. When decisions about life and death matters and about the policies that govern one-sixth of our economy are being made on the basis of beliefs that just ain’t so … well, that’s a bad thing for America.
The Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent and non-partisan health research organization, has done us all a service by producing a nine-minute video that explains the essentials of the new law. The video is cute, funny, fair and clear — the best layperson’s explanation that I have seen or read about this complicated subject. Please take a look and pass it along. It won’t end the fights about health reform, but at least maybe we’ll focus those fights on things that are real, and not on things that are made-up.
There’s more information from Kaiser on their special Health Reform website.