How to fix healthcare

Re “Mandatory health insurance? No sale,” Opinion, Sept. 25

Jamie Court made perfect sense. How is forcing people to have health insurance an improvement over the mess we’re in? Any solution that continues to pump money into giant insurance companies is no solution at all. How does a tax break on mediocre health insurance help a poor person who may pay little or no taxes because his earnings are so low already? We need national healthcare such as that in European countries. Instead, the fat cats try to scare average Americans with the distorted use of words like “socialism.”

Ken Christensen

Los Osos

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Finally, someone has identified mandatory and universal health insurance proposals for what they really are: big pork for the insurance companies. I say gut the current insurance scheme and move back toward a fee-for-service system in which, as with automotive insurance, people contract with insurers more or less for catastrophic coverage. Can you imagine auto insurance with a co-pay for every oil change and tire rotation? And at the same time, individuals need to realize and accept that the availability of healthcare isn’t a guaranteed right, nor has it ever been free.

Ann K. Bowman

Santa Monica

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Court rightly criticizes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for seeking to deliver every Californian not dependent on Medicaid or Medicare to a health-insurance industry that many of us find increasingly unsatisfactory. Unfortunately, he identifies the wrong cause of increasing costs.

The idea that health insurers are unregulated because the state does not directly fix prices is absurd. Current over-regulation of health insurance in California drives premiums up by as much as 30%.

Court claims that “healthcare is so expensive today because no one is watching costs,” and he’s right. But his solution is for the state to watch the costs instead of empowering individuals to do so. We need the state to get our healthcare dollars out of the hands of the public- and private-sector bureaucrats and into the hands of patients.

John R. Graham

Director

Health Care Studies

Pacific Research Institute

San Francisco