The system is fatally flawed

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