Insurance isn’t the answer when all houses are burning

Insurance isn’t the answer when all houses are burning

EDITOR:

Health care is a prime subject in the news anymore, and it bothers me that a health-care plan and health-care insurance are used interchangeably. A health-care plan is not insurance. Insurance might be illustrated by fire insurance on your house, under which 10,000 of us go together and join an insurance plan. If someone’s house burns down we will all kick in to pay for the destroyed house. Sure enough, somebody’s house burns down for say a loss of $100,000. We all put $10 into the fund and the unlucky person rebuilds his house. It works well, and no one pays a burdensome amount of money unless everybody’s houses burn down. Then everybody has to pay the full $100,000, and there is no longer an insurance plan.

Health care is like the second example. We are all going to die. It’s part of nature, and we are going to be unhealthy before we die. Some more and some less, but we are all going to have an unhealthy condition before we die. Everyone’s house is going to burn down. Medical insurance does not exist. Only medical plans exist. So we all have to pay the total expense for everybody’s unhealthy condition. It is an enormous expense. So much so, that we can’t do it.

Some of us will join a health-care system that will try to minimize the costs and stress of preventative medicine and healthy lifestyles. To some extent, this will prolong the inevitable. But, it will not avoid it.

To think that the government has some magical solution to the problem is to believe that Harry Potter can wave a wand and the problem will disappear. Our present system of everyone under 65 solving their own health problems to their best liking is a far better system. Any government solution will work like Medicare and Medicaid, which are quickly going broke trying to provide health care to only part of the population.

DONALD BUTLER

Warren

Turn back the clock on trickle-down economics

EDITOR:

I can’t believe that our government named an airport after Ronald Reagan — and an aircraft carrier. This guy and his trickle down theory helped to destroy the manufacturing base in this country and cost workers their jobs. All of those tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate America went back into their pockets and helped them move their businesses overseas and to Mexico.

Then along comes G.W. Bush and he gives the richest 1 percent another tax cut. Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture? At least there can be something done about G.W.’s tax cuts, but what Reagan did is irreversible and we will have to live with that forever.

Something can be done if only our people in Congress step up and make these back stabbing companies pay through the nose for what they have done to the working people in America. Roll back those tax cuts for the rich, take back the tax breaks given to companies who have moved overseas and to Mexico and give tax incentives to corporations that bring jobs to America.

BUD McKELVEY

Hermitage