What is a Moderate?

Here in Georgia, we are redefining what it means to be a moderate. Right now, the two major parties want to force people into two camps, liberal or conservative. They are moving these camps further and further to the left or right. They want the people to believe that political beliefs are a range. It makes things easier. its easier to incite your base if you can use throwaway terms instead of addressing the issues. It is easier to get your constituents to buy into your bills if you can generalize the bill according to an ideology rather than the actual issue itself. We believe that ideological thought processes are radical, and creating solutions based on the issues themselves, without any preconceived ideological biases, is true moderate thinking.

For example, it is easy for Dems to sell the healthcare package because they label and design the package as bigger government. Republicans are finding ways to incite their constituents against the bill because they allege bigger government.

Unfortunately, what Washington does now is not pass into law solutions, but ideas. There are so many costs that go into healthcare, and no one in Congress has bothered to figure out how the new healthcare bill is going to affect those costs. For all we know, the costs could skyrocket, thus putting a taxable load on the american people.

Here is how a moderate would handle the problem (according to how we think what a moderate is): use basic engineering principles. Determine your inputs, change an input, measure the change in output(s). perform the change for each. Optimize the solution based upon the changes. Have a means for measuring results and a way to change the input if the results are not satisfactory.

Applied to the healthcare debate, there are about 9 major factors that lead to "costs" in healthcare (chronic illnesses, fraud, lawsuits, inefficiencies, etc.). What we should do is go to the local level and change one of the inputs. For example, a city can be funded by the federal government to crack down hard on insurance fraud. measure the output. use the cities and local governments as test tubes. figure out a process in which the major inputs can be changed at a local level and measure the output. figure out what works best (reduces costs, increases quality, increases accessibility).

No where in this discussion did I invoke the need for smaller government, more taxes, etc. The solution will come from the problem itself.

Just a thought.