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In 1973, Britain formed a London Emergency Services Liaison Panel that required the coast guard, Royal Air Force, and ambulance, police, and fire personnel to coordinate their efforts during disaster responses. Generally, the nationalized British health-care system is well integrated with its emergency response teams. And 9/11 only galvanized the British further, as in the terrorist attack's aftermath they established a London Regional Resilience Forum, which formed partnerships with all of the key emergency responders.

Welcome to strong health

Due to the full set of tests one may find 100% of bugs. However, according to statistics, no single type can give you this result. It means that if you cover your program by thousands of unit tests, you'll catch up maybe 30% of bugs without manual tests.

If the same statistics had existed for the full set of health, I think it would have given nearly the same results. There is no magic pill or exercise which makes you healthy alone. However there is a set of elements which together will bring your health and mood to absolutely new level. From my experience (and according to my lessons ;)), these core components of good health are:

  1. Healthy food and water
  2. Positive thinking (you are what you think)
  3. Regular sport exercises
  4. Sound and regular sleep

I mean you can not be healthy when you think about yourself as healthy man or woman, however eat sandwiches and drink liters of cola.

You can not be healthy by spending all your time in gym, but sleeping one night 3 hours, other 5 hours, another 15 hours.

But you can and will be healthy if:

  • your sleep is regular and lasts from 7 to 9 hours
  • you eat healthy food, for the most part fruits and vegetables
  • at least two times a week you do some physical exercises
  • and you really believe that all that you do makes you healthy!

It is my lesson that have come to me not from one day of my life, but maybe for the last two years of constant experimenting.

For instance, I felt myself sluggish for the last two days. It was strange for me because I was eating well, sleeping good and having optimistic thoughts. However, something was wrong... But, how I felt myself great spending 1.5 hours at the Aikido ! It was like a reborn!

Strong health care reform without a public option

Even if you assume the government could create and successfully implement a public plan, it would still be opposed by a sizeable minority of Americans. Factor in the likely side-effects of a public plan and how hard it would be to address issues as they occur, and it's easy to see why so many people are uneasy with it. All things being equal, private industry generally does a better job than the government, especially over long stretches of time.

However, being skeptical of a public plan is not the same as being against health-care reform. I am personally glad to see the administration signalling its understanding of this point and willingness to explore other options to achieve reform.

Instead of a public plan, consider the idea of goverment-drafted insurance plans fulfilled by private insurers. The goverment would draft coverage agreements at Bronze, Silver and Gold service levels which individuals could buy in the public market. This provides a selection for different income levels as well as confidence in what is covered and includes reform provisions such as requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions and wellness benefits. It would also reduce prices by making health insurance a commodity with robust competition.

Ideally these plans would be modeled on the HDHP/HSA model to return market economics to routine health care needs while protecting people finacially from catastrophic or chronic illness.

To expand coverage to more Americans subsidies could be used in the form of vouchers.

Goverment-sponsored research of best-practices (comparative effectiveness) as well as basic and applied research for expensive chronic conditions will provide information and new drugs to the system to reduce costs of covering customers on the government-sponsored plans.