I have been involved with health care access since 1973. I have worked in both the public sector with Medicaid and Medicare and the private sector in the insurance business. I am an independent employee benefit specialist and a large part of my job is conducting and coordinating benefit enrollments and meetings for local employers. So I have seen the effects of this nation’s broken health insurance system from just about all sides. John Edwards has come out with the first really concrete idea on how to achieve universal health insurance for all Americans since the Clinton health care initiative back in 1993.

His proposals are workable and get right to the heart of the issue. Unlike other nations, the United States has a fairly good private health insurance infrastructure that does a pretty good job of handling claims and pricing risk. What is lacking is a cohesiveness to the system and the current fragmentation with its inefficiencies is causing it to be overly expensive and cumbersome.