This morning, I had an epiphany.

Everyone knows that the health care system in this country is broken. That fact is pretty much undisputed. There are currently several health care “reform” bills working their way through Congress. Each one is in excess of 1000 pages and essentially tries to cover everything from providing affordable access to insurance to keeping the cost of tissue and Tylenol under control.

There are a lot of points of contention and disagreement. With 1000+ pages of proposed legislation and literally hundreds of amendments being debated, this whole thing is going nowhere…fast. All you hear every single day is “so and so says this won’t work” or “they refuse to support this unless..”

Congress is working to reform the health care system in this country. Even with all the posturing, rhetoric, and windbagging going on from the party leadership on both sides of the aisle, I have to give them credit for trying.

But they aren’t trying hard enough.

One of my favorite characters in a book often says “Think of the solution, not the problem.” Congress is spending too much time thinking about the problem instead of working on a solution. Not only are they thinking about the problem, but they’re concocting more problems to go along with it. Sub-problems, if you will.

I work in the IT industry. There is a bedrock principle that some have unfortunately abandoned. KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid. I think this idea can do that.

In trying to reform health care, Congress needs to look at how health care works. What I mean by that is this:

If you are sick, and go to the doctor and you get a prescription, you don’t take the pills all at once. Why is Congress taking all the reform pills at once? If you take all your pills at once, you don’t get better. You probably wind up on a slab in the city morgue.

There are a LOT of things in each of the bills flying around that pretty much EVERYONE is in agreement on. These are good changes and there’s not a lot of debate going on over these points, but they are being held up by all these other sticking points.

President Obama should get his pen ready, and Congress should start passing smaller bills (PillBills) to start implementing health care reform. We need simply written legislation that addresses specific issues, not some giant law that could have too many loopholes or be so hard to understand that it will take years to fully be in effect.

• Exclusion due to pre-existing conditions
• Lifetime Maximums
• Cost Sharing (co-pays etc) limits
• Reducing Health Disparities
• Preventive Care
• Health Care Education

Each one of these is a “PillBill” that Congress could pass and get this nation’s sick health care system on the road to getting well without an accidental overdose.

Congress needs to stop trying to tackle everything all at once. Put in smaller changes, instead.
It even makes sense politically. It shows they’re getting things done, and even working together to do it, which is what pretty much everyone in this country wants. Right?

This way, health care reform will get started and the American people will be able to start seeing some benefits to it, while Congress irons out the more contentious issues, which can be PillBills themselves. They’ll just be a little harder to swallow.

Contact your Senators and Congressional Representatives, and tell them to give America a prescription of PillBills to fix health care.

At this point, something is better than nothing.