Bruno's Health Care Reform Proposal - Update #1

A few days ago we presented a comprehensive approach to completely installing a new health care reform process in the country and dumping Obama Care in the process. We listed out the eighteen reasons to resent the atrocity that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid forced upon the country, an atrocity of a bill that will never work, and we then listed out the eighteen concepts that we saw necessary to simply, elegantly, and effectively fix the health care cost situation in the country.

One of our eighteen concepts was to find a way to transform the use of tobacco farm land from tobacco to some other crop. Since smoking is a primary root cause of the high health care costs in the country, finding a way to entice tobacco farmers to freely plant other crops would serve the dual purpose of reducing the supply of tobacco, increasing its price/lessening its demand, and would provide new crops for the economy that would either enhance life or reduce food prices. Two days after publishing this idea I came across an Associated Press article that does just that. Seems that some researchers are working to genetically modify tobacco plants for use as a biofuel.

The article quotes a researcher who claims that tobacco can be modified to become an "energy plant" since it can generate a large amount of oil and sugars, more efficiently than other biofuel crops, that can be turned into biofuel. This researcher recently published an article in Plant Biotechnology Journal describing how researchers have found a way to adjust tobacco's genetic structure which increases the amount of oil in the leaves by a factor of twenty.

Think about how elegant this solution would be. Tobacco products would cost more since there would be less tobacco plants grown for personal use, the genetically modified tobacco and its fields would be used for biofuels. Less product to smoke in the face of the same demand, would cause the prices of tobacco products to rise, possibly creating a high cost incentive to not smoke. Less people smoking means less smoking-related disease which means lower health care costs. Increasing the amount of biofuels in the market would eventually reduce the cost and help ween the country off of foreign energy sources. Since, according to the article, tobacco usage is starting to decline anyway, providing a way for farmers to grow a new cash crop to help keep them in business would make them happy also. The only concern would be if bootleggers entered the market and started pushing their products unlawfully. However, it is likely their products would be inferior to the current market's product and the risk of bootlegging is worthwhile, given the upside to our smoking problem and energy problem.

Everybody wins. Unfortunately, it does not appear that any of this thinking went into the health care reform bill. As we said in the original post, this bill legislates a bunch of things, none of which are significantly geared to changing behavior (eating better, exercising more, losing weight, reducing smoking levels, etc.). Without changing behavior, no health care plan will work because the bad behaviors are still present. This approach of using tobacco production for biofuels rather than personal tobacco use would change behavior.

But alas, the political class went about health care reform like they go about everything else. It is like performing delicate surgery with an axe and using oven mitts to wield the axe. Very, very sloppy and usually ineffective. Better to use a fine scalpel and latex gloves when performing surgery and have a little elegance to the process. Oven mitts, and the political class, have never been associated with elegance.

We will revisit "Bruno's Health Care Reform Proposal" many times going forward as we learn how poorly the Obama plan is serving America and how other, more elegant, simpler, less expensive, and less freedom draining options present themselves.


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