Misunderstandings abound with group health insurance

Misunderstandings abound with group health insurance

After group health in- surance is abolished by a whopping act of political force majeure, how will those current beneficiaries of group health insurance be re-educated on how they’ve allowed themselves to be misled, and by whom will they be re-educated?

Let’s face it. Any nation that’s dopey enough to be plagued by group health insurance, sometimes called the Rorem-Kimball template, and mostly not recognize that it’s being plagued is going to need a whole lot of help.

Consider, for example, the “I like my insurance” folks who don’t even recognize it’s not “their” insurance, and that they pay for health care about the same way a bobbing cork can be said to swim. Our medically insured are great people, but they don’t have the stomach to admit they’ve never wanted to be demoted from the unduly medically enriched under group health insurance to mere grumbling taxpayers under a transparently organized national health plan, or, worst of all, to be busted down to cash patients.

Government will be in on political re-education right off the bat through, maybe, an Office of Health Care Renormalization. The OHCR’s thankless job will be to send regiments of surrogate speakers to PowerPoint their way across the country, explaining that group health insurance had to be abolished because it was such a god-awfully bad idea that only the vast amounts of money it delivered concealed how truly god-awful it was. Maybe there’ll be privately financed programs patterned on Kuebler-Ross ideas, or modeled on 12-step lines for those jonesing badly for utopian dime-on-a-dollar insurance.

Latecomers, such as religious groups, civic organizations, labor unions and intellectuals will take their cue from government and put their own organizational English into the big health care change. They picked their noses and directly enabled the evil of the current system. They ought to just admit cowardice and collaboration, and move on. Better enfeebled and late to the parade than not to show up at all, right?

Jack Labusch, Niles