‘Free’ health care was a bad idea from the start

‘Free’ health care was a bad idea from the start

EDITOR:

Thanks for Last Sunday’s article on health benefits, both those for government and private sector employees.

The reality of tax-exempt commercial health insurance is that it was bad product from the moment it was cooked up by 1920s do-gooders. Imagine a benefit that instantly creates three-tier costs of labor, which commercial health insurance does, and that’s just for starters. Strapping a “truncated universal” like Medicare onto commercial health insurance risk pools, which is what Lyndon Johnson and the 89th Congress did, made as much sense as hitching a Ferrari to the Budweiser Clydesdales to get more horsepower.

Trust me, though. No amount of arguing or rhetorical gimmickry will persuade even the best-intended and brightest among our medically insureds there’s something profoundly wrongheaded about the benefits they enjoy at what they mistakenly take to be very little cost to themselves.

On Capitol Hill, the current tortured debate over health care reform makes me think of the course that slavery took from the signing of the Constitution through its abolition by Civil War and subsequent Constitutional amendment.

There was opposition by sentiment, formal arguments in opposition, direct action by such means as the Underground Railroad, Constitutional delimitation of the slave trade, political wrangling and compromise over slavery’s expansion, melioration of the conditions of those held in bondage, the example of England’s emancipation of its slaves, and the manumission by many Americans of their own slaves. Yet, for all the good they did, these incremental measures allowed slavery to become ever more entrenched with cotton agriculture and the Southern patrician lifestyle.

Don’t our senators see something similar with health care? Two-thirds the nation is allowed approximate medical purchasing parity, all of it assisted by massive government intervention, such as enormous direct purchasing and huge tax preferences. Another third is completely ignored, except for the ritual bleating about the medically uninsured, or is corralled into politically vulnerable risk pools such as SCHIP and Medicaid. Is getting health care for sick people a good thing, or not?

How much longer is this expected to go on?

JACK LABUSCH

Niles