What's this about?

"The Health Care Analyst" is a fairly sweeping title, especially when you consider that its author has no background or specialization in health care. My reasons for creating this forum began in the midst of our current debate over health care (2009). In trying to become a more informed voter, I noticed at first that virtually none of the news stories I read described the various legislative attempts at health care "reform" with any amount of precision. What I sought, and did not find, were answers to two basic questions:

1. What problem or problems are we trying to solve here?
2. What's being proposed, and how does it solve the problem or problems mentioned above?

You would have thought that a free press and an open democractic society would have made it very easy to find the answers to these questions. Not so, or at least not entirely. What I found fell into the following categories:

1. Coverage about the political maneuvers surrounding this or that bill — what factions might vote for it, who might switch votes, which lobbies were involved.
2. Coverage and opinion that presumed significant familiarity with the intricacies of the debate, which is by its nature highly complex.
3. Coverage and opinion strongly colored by unexplored presuppositions (aka "ideology")

I conclude that if I am experiencing this information gap, others may be as well.

Please understand I make no pretense of expertise in this area, at all. But what I intend to do, as time permits, is go out and find the best, clearest sources of information available, boil them down and extract their key points, and provide you with pointers to the resources if you want to wallow in their glorious, gory detail. Along the way, I'll doubtless take some pot shots at what I see as some of the more severely unexamined presumptions that color the debate. My first stop, when I get there, will be "negotiated costs."