Group health insurance called great political fraud of centuries

Group health insurance called great political fraud of centuries

Part-time worker Bob buys Obamacare, has one ER visit, and at the end of 2014 is out of pocket $6,600. With an iffy $7,000 government subsidy added, Bob will consume more health care than he produces of anything else.

Armed with a hefty employer subsidy and tax exemption, Bob’s full-time colleague has more than twice the ability to pay, but will pay only $575 out of pocket.

This is Obamacare? Jeez!

The solution? Repeal Obamacare. Then abolish the underlying Rorem-Kimball group health insurance model, which is unique to America.

Even the staunchest opponents of Obamacare secretly hold such strong misgivings about group health insurance they’ve never been crazy enough to propose its expansion into, say, group food benefits.

The Rorem-Kimball model only gained life among many businessmen in the 1940s as a politically expedient although economically nuts tool to counter industrial socialization via, for example, benign-sounding full employment legislation. By blocking numerous national health bills then thought of as the thin edge of the socialist wedge, businessmen did just that.

The theory was that by collectivizing people into small-time, employer-paid insurance groups, which were little understood then and now, they’d squelch big-time industrial nationalization later.

How’d that work out for, say, today’s government-controlled General Motors, an early adopter of the Rorem-Kimball model?

A weird relic of utopian Bolshevism, Rorem-Kimball is the economic disease that promised to be its own cure. It’s not unfair to call group health insurance a great political fraud of the 20th and now 21st centuries, with businessmen as perpetrators and victims.

With its incredible capacity to consume more money than workers earn, Rorem-Kimball will force its own destruction soon, so it’s up to civic leaders to decide how the coming health care collapse will occur and what will replace the current system.

Jack Labusch, Niles