I’m having a difficult time believing that FOX calls this an interview. The elephant in the room is that FOX and much of its audience want to believe that everything would be OK without any sort of health care reform.   That assumption seemed to be driving the questioning.  In the past few months, though, I’ve been meeting more and more people who are going without health insurance, which can lead to tragic foreclosures and bankruptcies. This situation is not tenable.

With regard to this frustrating interview, I do find some fault with President Barack Obama too. He’s claims both that we know what’s in the bill and that we’ll someday see what’s in the bill.   And he speaks as though there is going to be a meaningful comment period.  I’ll be watching to see how many hours tick by after passage of this bill, before the bill is rammed home at the White House. We’ll see how much input the citizens will have. And from what we suspect, the Obama bill will apparently be a huge gift to corporations that are gaming the health care system. But you wouldn’t know any of this based on the questions by this hack interviewer.

We desperately need to reform the health care system, though I think that most of that work, and much of the sacrifices will need to be incurred by individual Americans.  The national debate thus frustrates me because it is, I think, fundamentally dishonest.  We, the People need to take far better care of their bodies and quit expecting our (incredibly talented) health care professionals to bail us out of problems we create with our terrible eating habits and sedentary lifestyles. And we might need to better understand that more high-tech medicine does not necessarily lead to better for real-life health and mortality rates. Americans are dreaming to think that they can pay less and get the same or more of the same type of healthcare that they are currently consuming. Something’s gotta give. Maybe a lot of things gotta give.

Mostly, we need meaningful exchanges of information in order to improve health care delivery.   We need civilized debate and straight talk.  This “interview” was pathetic–I do put most of the blame on the shallow-minded sputtering “interviewer,” who came equipped mostly with barking points, rather than any interest in developing useful ideas. This session should be shown in journalism schools a an example of how not to conduct an interview. I’d never seen Bret Baier until this interview. I’d bet that he never again gets a chance to conduct any high profile interview. I really have to wonder about his objective going in, other than a dozen barking points.