Health care is something I have written about many times. Although generally conservative on many issues, my opinions on the subject are based on two major life experiences.

First, I have been a businessman nearly my entire life, having started this newspaper as a teenager 42 years ago. Throughout that time, I had to learn way more about health care than I ever wanted to know. I had no choice. Our system of health care makes every business owner a health care executive whether they want to be or not. Personally, I would rather just be a newspaper publisher and horse farmer, which are the two businesses I chose to spend my whole life learning about.

My second life experience is the same as everyone has. We are all human beings and understand that people get sick, experience pain and eventually die. That is the common bond that the entire human race shares. Hopefully, not too many of us have no compassion for their fellow man.

In my mind, the health care debate transcends most other more ordinary issues. It is too important to the human experience to be just another service business enterprise. I think that is what Republicans in Congress are learning. Their constituents may be conservative, but they are human beings that don't want to be sick and suffer and they don't want other people to either. I want to know that I can get help when I need it and I want that for everybody.

To me, health insurance itself led to this current complicated mess. In the old days, you paid the doctor $5 cash and he came to your house. Doctors made good money but they were not all millionaires and got into medicine because they had skills that were valuable to mankind. Insurance led to health care being commoditized. That led to doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurance companies making this essential human service into a money making machine.

Being a doctor has always been an exalted position going back to the days of the Indian medicine man, as well it should be. Certainly with the training and skills required, they deserve to be paid well. But our current health insurance system has complicated the lives of everybody, especially doctors.

Republicans are wrong when they do not address the need to make sure everyone is cared for. Democrats are wrong when they pretend that you can give everything to everybody without addressing costs. Their plan, Obamacare, has made a big problem worse. The Republican-proposed plans do just the same. Both parties, in my opinion, are paying lip service to their constituents while lining their pockets with big money from the various players in the health care industry.

With Obamacare in a death spiral and Republicans in danger of losing control of Congress with their dithering, now may be the golden opportunity to fix a broken system. Even President Donald Trump would be on board with a real fix because he has always said he wants a great, non-ideological health plan that would better serve the American people. Normally hard core conservative Ted Cruz is even introducing a more compassionate plan that shows promise. Kudos to him for thinking out of the ideological and partisan box.

Basically, I have long opined that we need to have a government plan like Medicaid or some sort of Obamacare-type plan that is subsidized by the taxpayers. Don't try to pretend that it isn't by simply making working people pay outrageous premiums for their own complicated health care to subsidize everybody else. Decide what minimum coverage should be provided to everyone despite pre-existing conditions, etc. Admit that there is a cost to this and let the people decide what levels they are willing and able to pay for.

Then, let people buy private insurance if they so desire as a supplement. Continue to encourage businesses to offer this as a perk for working for them on a voluntary basis. That way you don't take away the incentive for people to work hard to improve their own lives, which is in itself getting to be a big problem in the Western world today. But disconnect that from the basic health care that is provided to all Americans.

I do not agree with the Democrats that unlimited health care is a right. There has to be some kind of limits. However, I do believe that a basic level of care should be provided by the taxpayers just because we are all human beings. I think that the American people are ready to face up to that burden if the politicians would get out of the way.

That's my take, what's yours? Let us know by voting in this week's Online Poll asking what you would most want to see in an American health care bill.