President Obama promised yesterday that the White House will do its part to find and support grass-roots organizations that are successful in their efforts to improve communities. At the gathering, Obama praised a New Hampshire nonprofit that helps poor people buy fuel-efficient, reliable cars. He named Robert Chambers, president and cofounder of Bonnie CLAC, who attended the event and came up with the idea for the group after working at an auto dealership and seeing low-income individuals forced to pay high interest rates when they purchased cars.

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With the start of the fiscal year, the state Department of Mental Retardation has taken on a new name. The agency, which serves developmentally disabled children and adults, adopted the name Department of Developmental Services yesterday, signaling a victory for the disabled and their providers who lobbied for years against the pejorative phrase “mental retardation.’’

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I have not found anyone who thinks a person should not have Health Care coverage.  So I ask why is it so difficult to make people responsible.  There is one clear word to describe why,  FEAR!   Fear that they will be the one to carry the burden.  So I would to introduce you to another F word.  Fairness, in the placing of responsibility for health care.

Individuals are responsible to live healthy and to take responsibility for their actions when they do not.  Therefore, when it is clear that actions such as smoking or being over weight cause health problems it would be fair that the individual would bear a higher responsibility towards the cost for their actions.  It is not reasonable for anyone not to pay something towards health care.  Everyone gets sick eventually, so lets not leave anyone to opt out of their responsibility.

Businesses pay taxes which go towards many government services which includes Medicare and Medicaid.  In many cases businesses pay a level of health care for a percentage of their employees.   It is fair that for each employee a certain amount of money goes towards these costs as a tax .  The one thing about the medicare tax and employer tax is that they are predictable and do not sneak up on you with sudden increases and everyone pays.

The medical field has created a system where redundancy and second guessing is the rule.  The ”what if syndrome ” to protect one from lawsuits has become the extremely contagious illness.  It has been estimated that 30% of the health care costs are related to the extreme feeling of fear of catching the lawsuit bug.  Medicine has to be able to treated with reasonable expectation.  Those expectations require government to set the parameters and for the medical field to follow.  For those areas where risk is evident, one way to lower risk is to have more decisions made by a team.

So I would promote that all factions play together regardless of the risk.