Only winners earn trophies

Only winners earn trophies

EDITOR:

My 7-year-old daughter has participated in two years of youth soccer and T-ball. At the end of each season she received a “participation” trophy. The look on her face was priceless. I agree that kids at this age should receive a reward for their efforts.

However, I explained to her that as she gets older she will not (I hope) continue to receive trophies for just participating. The trophies will have to be earned and will be rewarded to the winners only, as they should. I attempted to explain how this translates to life as well. In order to succeed or obtain what she wants out of life she will need to work hard and do better than those she is competing against.

Though she is too young to comprehend the success or failure of a business, it got me to thinking. How could I explain the Forum Health situation to her? How is it even possible that a company that mismanages its affairs to the point of bankruptcy win a government bailout trophy?

These days it seems the trophies being handed out in the game of capitalism are not just to the winners.

BILL HEGARTY

Poland

The system is fatally flawed

EDITOR:

Obamacare seems to have morphed from a health reform bill accompanied by great expectations among the Democratic left into a portmanteau tax bill that’ll do nothing for health care costs, access, or quality.

Never mind that Obamacare, like Hillarycare nearly a generation earlier, was conceptually flawed from the outset by insisting for political reasons that commercial health insurance “worked” for the 160 million beneficiaries enrolled in so-called employment-based health insurance.

We’d need technically trained people to explain that the diversion of wages to commercial health insurance without any adequate accounting or explanation is a lousy notion. Just because group health insurance has been purchased that way for 80 years doesn’t make it a great idea. Commercial health insurance is an extremely strange consumer intangible, the “peculiar institution” (as slavery was once known) of the 20th and now 21st century. The sooner we’re rid of it, the better.

Politically zombified, our medically insureds are, to put it unkindly, a collective piece of work. We saw some of them this past summer at those town hall meetings, which had me and other folks wondering whether we’d entered some new Dark Age without a flashlight. Were those folks actually arguing that it’s a good thing to deny medical attention to sick people?

We’ll get real universal health care with explicit cost controls, eventually, and I fear America’s creditor nations and a future president exercising Constitutional brute force will have more to do with it than anyone can yet imagine.

What kind of political bloodbath can we expect when a president is compelled to constitutionally seize medical practices and hospitals under the Fifth Amendment to impose order and economy on a health care system that’s long been unglued from reality?

We’ll get universal health care — eventually. Will we have to detour first to where the number of Americans who die needlessly for lack of health care jumps from a reported 20,000 a year to 100,000, or more?

JACK LABUSCH

Niles