Next step in fixing health-care system is universal coverage

Next step in fixing health-care system is universal coverage

Why should you look for American universal health care by 2015? What will happen is a declining dollar will make Chinese consumer goods increasingly costly, and residual corporate anxiety over Obamacare will cause increased jobs-dumping, leading some enterprising politicians to propose universal health as a relief measure, using only the most recently uninsured as a political hook.

My personal guess is there’s already preliminary and highly secret work within the Justice and Health and Human Services Departments to incorporate the assets of existing health insurers into some sort of rationalized Medicare- for-All plan or national health service.

That’s all to the good. A factory worker earning $12 an hour will once again cost $12 an hour, instead of up to $18 an hour and more, as under Rorem-Kimball. You may in the future make a pitcher of margaritas in a blender made in Schenectady, not Shanghai. That’s the dream.

What is Rorem-Kimball? That’s your group health insurance. Rorem-Kimball’s method of heaping a “sur-wage” atop ordinary wages was the beginning of the Big Lie that its beneficiaries could have free health care without paying a terrible price for it. That Big Lie undermined whole swaths of Western values, which I’ve written about elsewhere in detail.

I expect a South African-style truth commission convened by Congress in 2015 will have to seal its examination of Rorem-Kimball, maybe for a generation, because its findings will be so inflammatory.

Rorem-Kimball was created in outright admiration of the Soviet Union. Republican partisans’ efforts to claim group health insurance as a creature of free markets is laughable and counterfactual. Your insurance is grafted from Josef Stalin, not Adam Smith.

Communist Russia cracked about 1990, but remnants of its influence lie in Cuba and North Korea and elsewhere, not least among America’s anxious and desperate uninsured, victims of Rorem-Kimball’s bumbling and enormously expensive effort to sovietize corporate America.

Jack Labusch, Niles