How bad is health insurance?

How bad is health insurance?

With the Iowa caucuses scheduled for Tuesday, is there anything Republicans can do to keep from losing all credibility on health care? After all, their attacks on Obamacare don’t mean much when the current Republican front-runner in Iowa is Mitt Romney, after whose Massachusetts health plan Obamacare was reportedly patterned.

Republicans need to know what America’s unique group health insurance is, because that’s the original economic pathology in health care. Cooked up by a university administrator and his colleagues, group health insurance arrogantly sought to distill the then Soviet Union’s advances in health care access inside a capitalist bottle. They ended up with actuarial moonshine.

America’s group health insurance covers the wrong people, if you actually want to deliver health care to sick people in a timely fashion (although you need to be a mathematician to know why that’s so). Imagine, for example, “group potato benefits” in which the only people enrolled are those who don’t like potatoes much, don’t know when they’ll eat potatoes again, don’t know how much potatoes cost, and don’t know by how much they don’t like potatoes.

What should Republicans do before introducing their own universal health care bill, which will necessarily include the abolition of group health insurance?

Select officials from the Republican National Committee, the current presidential contenders, and a handful of state governors need to meet with consulting actuaries who are independent of industry and government. The actuaries may be American retirees, or work in Canada or the United Kingdom. The mathematics are the same everywhere, but it takes psychological distance to see how group health insurance in America is rigged to be so uniquely and god-awfully bad, and probably the most destructive actuarial product in history.

Jack Labusch, Niles

Save Youngstown’s post office

The people of Youngstown need the post office in our city.

I pay my bills and get stamps to write to my son.

They deliver mail through rain, shine and deep snow. They are like family, so, please, keep our family here.

Janice Wilson, Youngstown