If, as politicians are fond of telling us, “Americans are not stupid,” the current anger over the “health care debate” seems to indicate otherwise. To get such an easily fooled public to respond to sound bites referring to “death panels” and Obama taking the U.S. into a “socialist regime” tells me that there is little intelligent life out there. (ie. the “death panels” are actually a good, counseling idea for elderly persons and families, enabling them to make wise and complicated decisions about end of life care. There is no mandate involved!)

I wonder why there is no truly public debate about the merits of single-payer health insurance or even allowing a public option. If any local readers of the T-I read R. Lance Christie’s well-articulated and thoughtful letter to the editor on Sept. 24, they would have noted the fact that administrative overhead we pay out of each privately insured medical dollar spent is almost $.25. In contrast, the administrative overhead we pay for any governmental option (Medicaid, Medicare, etc.) is only $.03 to $.04 per dollar.

In a recent article, Greg Palast points out that what health insurance companies take for their profit is called MLR or “Medical Loss Ratio.” He explains, “The MLR is the difference between what you pay an insurance company and what that insurer pays out to the doctors, hospitals and pharmacists for your medical care… Until the 1990s, insurers skimmed only about a nickel on the dollar for their ‘service,’ says Wendell Potter, the CIGNA insurance company PR whistle-blower. Today, Potter notes, ‘porky operators like AIG have kicked up their loss ratio by nearly 500 percent.’ The industry’s slice is growing to nearly a quarter of your insurance bill. All of it just paperwork and profiteering.”

Palast goes on, “The only solution to loss ratio piggery… eliminate health insurers from the health industry entirely… we don’t need health insurance for everyone, we need health care for everyone. There’s a giant difference. Instead of concentrating on payment, we need to focus solely on providing the health service… It’s kind of like the fire department. When your house is on fire, you don’t call your fire insurance company, you call the fire department. But, you might say, ‘That’s socialism!‘ Well, yes, it is. And I’m not afraid to use the S-work: socialized medicine. Just like America’s socialized fire departments. (Fun fact: socialized, ie. publicly funded, fire departments were ‘invented’ by the revolutionary Ben Franklin.)”

—Marcia Tendick

Moab