Cal Thomas fails miserably with health-care propaganda

Shame on Cal Thomas for recycling that propaganda about the alleged horror of health care in the United Kingdom. A political fear monger’s staple for 70 years, it was first put out in a seedy, ignorant pamphlet marked by Red-baiting, Kraut-bashing, and Brit-slamming.

Chill out, Cal. Grab some pub grub. Tweet when you have something to say that doesn’t channel some ancient lobbyist’s trash talk.

Cal, of course, isn’t just trashing the U.K.; he’s defending his own theory of health care distribution. He just doesn’t know what it is. Nor do America’s intellectuals.

A Boston think tank has it that the imposition and the lifting of World War II wage controls both somehow caused the spread of group health insurance. Harrumphing indignantly about the dubious morality of paying for other people’s health care, an academic at a selective Eastern university ignores that’s exactly how his employer-paid, tax-exempt group health insurance works.

One Michigan institute exercises its free-market chops by, amazingly, scolding uninsured folks for not paying $1,100 for what insured folks pay $40. This rubbish goes on and on.

What thinkers like Cal have done is “normalized” America’s pathological, twisted-up Rorem-Kimball group health- insurance model. The Rorem-Kimball phenomenon is what needs explaining, but intellectuals have no stomach for the job.

That seedy pamphlet worked. Its authors tipped a hat to “sound actuarial principles,” without caring they’d set the stage for insuring America’s presumptively healthy at the highest cost with horrific effects. Bankrupt Detroit’s relatively young municipal worker retirees are owed more in health care than pension benefits, for example.

That’s why group health insurance will be abolished, and sooner rather than later. That’s why the Mahoning Valley’s civic leaders need to stay alert to news accounts that hint at a major crack-up in health care.

Jack Labusch, Niles