Mr. President, Let Them Eat Cake, Equitably.

"Kind Sirs, the people are hungry. Many have no food at all, and most have too little food. What shall we do?" The kind sirs answered, "Let them eat cake."
-----The American For Profit Health Care Companies


I have three kids. Grown now, but they really put a DENT in my life. The first one disrupted my life. The second one squared that disruption. The third one cubed the disruption so as to not allow anything else into the sphere of our existence. We had to devise strategies to survive under the tyranny of three children.

For example:trips. "Are we there yet?" still sends shivers down my spine. Trips to Grandparents were an interminable 2 hour and fifteen minutes of constant abuse by my children.

Soultion: Give each child ten dimes at the start of the trip. Any time they asked a question they forfeited ten cents. The dimes they had left upon arrival, they kept. Fortunately the corporate little minds didn't fathom that I was desperate enough that they could have held me up for at least ten dollars each. Ah the blissful peace that those dimes purchased.

Example: Cake (i.e. pies, brownies, and all other divisible foods) No matter how elegantly precise a parent divided the cake or how fair the choosing there was always contention from the ranks. His is bigger! Her's is taller. He has more. Mine has more air bubbles than hers.

Solution: Let them choose which one of the three got to cut the cake, and who got to choose first. That always worked because we had the rules that the one that cut the cake always chose last, and no one chose first twice in a row. Believe me they always knew who went first the last time. But that meant that the cutter of the cake had to be as precise as they possibly could to make each piece absolutely equal to the others. Otherwise they would not get their own fair share. My oldest son for example became so precise that he would so equally divide the pieces that I believed the variation could have best been measured at a molecular level.

But equal is not always equity. One kid may not have loved brownies with nuts as much as the other two. So that kid was always chosen by the remaining two to make the cuts knowing that he/she would make one small piece for them self and two equal larger pieces for the other two to choose from (most of the time any way).

Tonight the President is going to speak about Health Care Reform. I so wish that there was a way so that all of the kids involved could cut up the pie like my kids did. Nobody trust any of the others. No one wants to give up one molecule of their share. All do not trust the Government to cut it up because they KNOW that this Government favors the the others over them and will cheat them somehow. This is a perfect situation for the cutter being last and no one being first twice.

Mr. President, that's the kind of reform I want to see. Reform where the stock holders, and the CEOs, and the policy holders, and the docs, and patients, and the care providers, and the hospitals, and pharmacies, the indigent, the careful, and the terminally stupid, all get their equitable share and can live with the results.

Good luck Mr. President.