Keep It Simple! (125)

For heaven’s sakes!

Have you tried to decipher the Medicaid/SSI/VA Benefits laws recently?  If you have you will agree with me that someone needs to take a look at these laws and simplify them, if not for their own good, for the good of the rest of us.  And, we don’t need a new 27,000 page book of rules.  No, we need something that the average 75 or 80 year old can understand and use.

Does that sound too challenging?  I have been getting more and more concerned as I have seen the laws getting increasingly complex while the baby boomers age and many people are either childless or only have one child.  I just hope the children of the baby boomers are either lawyers or have enough money to hire lawyers to wade through the spaghetti tangle of regulations and exceptions to the existing laws.

For a time I was a trust administrator and I used to file insurance and medicare claims for my clients.  What a mess that was. And, that was back a few years when there were fewer hoops to jump through. As I age, I become concerned about my future ability to understand how all of the government health programs work and what I will do when I am confronted with personal health issues.

To put this simply I say, “Listen up government! Clean up the health care regulations. Make them understandable for average people. Make them usable and helpful.”

Or, maybe things have to get complex before they can become simple, as Alan Perlis observed.

“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.”