No angels of health care

EDITOR,
I was confused by Patrick Hagan’s letter last week (“Where are their voices?” Press-Banner, July 17), in which he accuses Kaiser Permanente and other big health care insurers first of silence in the health care debate, then of deafness, presumably to the ideas of those who would completely redesign the way health care is financed and accessed in America to fulfill their dream of universal, state-run, one-size-fits-all medicine.
Like President Obama, Hagan conflates the issues of health care reform and last fall’s collapse of the housing bubble, and just as disingenuously repeats Obama’s falsehood that a government-run plan is necessary to improve competition and reduce costs.
The first deceit is obvious to those with decent short-term memory. The banking and credit collapse was caused by a wave of subprime mortgage defaults, which like one tap on a row of dominos exposed weakness across the financial system. To amplify the health care system’s problem into a “crisis,” Obama was the first to theorize that health care costs contributed to our current recession.
The second is a contrivance. If this were merely about improving competition, why not reform existing regulations and allow insurers to sell and compete across state lines?
Perhaps most striking about Hagan and other advocates of Obama’s plan is their naive faith in the pure intentions of politicians: “While President Obama, the Congress and other stakeholders work diligently on solutions to the health care crisis …”
Nonsense. We are the stakeholders! Our representatives are working “diligently” on a system that will tax us more heavily than Europeans and move decisions about patient treatment from the physician’s office or the hospital board to federally appointed agencies.
As Milton Friedman once asked Phil Donahue about using government to eliminate inequity, “Where do you find these angels?”
David deMilo, Scotts Valley