LETTERS: HEALTH CARE FOR ALL ADDRESSES NEEDS OF ALL HUMANITY

To the editor:

When Americans were first asked what kind of health care they needed, they stressed simplification, understandability and transportability. The current hodgepodge serves only to complicate the situation and fails to address those concerns. Managed care preserves at least two misconceptions.

First is the mistaken assumption that health-care coverage should be attached to employment. It is a shared humanity claim, not an employment benefit. It springs from our common life together. Attaching this privilege to employment misses the point. Servicing our current system has become a heavy burden on employers.

Second is that private insurance carriers and their overlapping bureaucracies are indispensable to health-care delivery. Winston Churchill said: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, but only after they have tried everything else." Insurers have added a lucrative product to their other lines. Managed care is an arrangement to redistribute health-care dollars to administrative functions.

If we cannot agree that health care must be addressed on an all-inclusive basis, we are accepting the current non-system with its stupefying panoply of programs to benefit corporate interests. To steamroll such programs, Americans are bludgeoned with the specter of socialism if a universal health-care system is advanced. If Americans fear government bureaucrats, we're already seeing what a taskmaster private-industry bureaucrats are. All of the fancy footwork to avoid what America must do to be true to itself is only a way station on the road to America's own universal health-care delivery system.

GILBERT DEGENHARDT

Cape Girardeau