Consider This Cure for What's Ailing Us
Los Angeles Times
July 8, 2001
Commentary
by John Balzar
"I've been researching opinion polls. Nowhere do I see that Americans are clamoring for more courtroom tedium to heal what ails them. For that matter, nowhere do I see that they're feeling healthier thanks to bewildering insurance paperwork. But in poll after poll, a Top 10 concern of Americans is health care, plain and simple.
"The fan dance now underway in the capital will do nothing except make worse what is already occurring in the nation. Employer-based health insurance plans are eroding. Premiums are soaring. The number of Americans without insurance is climbing, perhaps to 45 million of us. Many cannot afford their medicine."
"Insurance companies do not deliver health care. They are profit-driven bureaucracies. If they had their way, they would insure only the healthy. As soon as we got unhealthy, we'd be uninsured."
"I say, let's collectively hire our own doctors and civil service health administrators. Private sector profits have no place in a business so important as life and death.
"Why are we so afraid of managing our own health care through our government, anyway? Because we don't want heavy-handed, slow-moving decisions. Yet what could be more heavy-handed and slow-moving than the system we have?
"Actually, we are afraid of just the words: Socialized Medicine.
"So let's start by changing terms. Let's call it, American Health Care."