Yesterday we learned that Mayor Vaughan Lies, Sticks Taxpayers With Personal Bills. Seems Mayor Vaughan stuck we-the-people with over $8,000 in personal bills after promising she wouldn't do so. But then is anyone really surprised after learning that Greensboro is 2044 of 2570 Cities In Money Management?
And thus the reason for this series If I Were Mayor Of Greensboro and why I intend to become the next Mayor of Greensboro, North Carolina. Should you be seeing this for the first time, all the posts are linked in succession so you can follow them back to here.
I promised to talk about healthcare and reducing the cost of doing business in Greensboro. Today I intend to do just that. The ACA, better known as Obamacare promised great things and across the board, affordable healthcare coverage for all Americans. Sadly, because Obamacare left a loophole, states like North Carolina were able to opt out leaving millions uninsured. In the interest of full disclosure I am one of those who got left out.
To add insult to injury, the cost of healthcare is rising dramatically even for those who were covered by Obamacare. Some pay more today than before the American Care Act.
And all politicians in Washington have done is point fingers. Even the most vocal opponents of Obamacare in Washington have offered no solutions to the problem. Why? Because they don't want solutions, they want campaign contributions and gifts from insurance companies-- one side no better than the other.
Now the social liberal in me says Greensboro should simply start our own single payer healthcare system but the fiscal conservative in me says we don't have the money. And while the social liberal side almost always won when I was a young man, now that I'm just days from being 60 years old the fiscal conservative side holds sway in matters involving money or the lack thereof.
But there is something Greensboro can do that will insure more people, reduce the cost of healthcare insurance and help Greensboro's businesses boost their bottom lines. And to make that happen I intend to ask Doctor Joseph Guarino to help us form a board to found an alternative for health care insurance in Greensboro.
Just like everyone else I'm naming in these posts, this is coming as a shock to Joe but I picked him because 1. he's a doctor and will see to it that doctors are treated fairly, 2. he recognizes there's a problem, 3. he's about as far to the political right as I am to the political left and 4. I place honesty over ideology and believe Joe to be sincere in his views even though we often disagree.
There are any number of options Doctor Guarino and his board could choose to follow. Among them is to form a health care pool made of of as many local employees as possible to buy insurance jointly.
Another might be to form a new health insurance cooperative provider in which everyone who purchases a policy becomes a partner in the company. And maybe other ideas I haven't thought of.
And because there's always strength in numbers, Joe and the board he would chair, if he decides to accept my offer, would be free to look for members throughout Guilford County, High Point and beyond.
Finally, before we move on to If I Were Mayor Of Greensboro: Part 16, allow me to make clear, these things I'm proposing can't all be accomplished in a single term. There simply isn't time and money. But if we recruit a block of like minded candidates from across party lines who are willing to place the needs of Greensboro's most needy citizens first and foremost we can become the city every city in the world dreams of being, both in terms of social change and economic growth.
After all, we can always undo the ideological mistakes of any government in the next session but once we've allow corruption to take place we can never get the money back.
