Open Letter to Mr. McHenry about Health Insurance

Dear Mr. McHenry:

Why do we even HAVE health-insurance companies? Health care is basically a supply-demand equation and we Americans know how to handle that. We buy groceries, houses, computers, automobiles, clothing, education and so on without any insurance “gatekeepers” to tell us “OK, you can have a Ford but not a Pontiac” or “no, you can’t buy a coat this winter, you bought one last year.” Or "you can't have anymore generic DVDs, you will have to buy these (which cost ten times as much)." And it’s not like we don’t all use health-care. Americans use health-care to get born, we use a lot of it when we die, and we all need teeth repaired and glasses replaced. From time to time we all have accidents and get sick and we all need health care. We "demand" medical services and we have a top-notch medical industry of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and organizations who can "supply" those services. Why do we think we need a gate-keeper to tell us we can have this but not that, or that's a “pre-existing condition”, or a certain procedure we need to live will cost more than we can afford so we can't have it, or that those pills the doctor has prescribed will cost $600 a month, even though they don’t really “cost” nearly that much?  And people who live in other countries get those same pills for much, much less!

We can take care of ourselves together as a nation, and supply-demand will work in this industry like it does elsewhere. All of the money these insurance companies get is money we pay to them, then they give a little bit of it back to us in the form of permission to get some medical service, and the rest goes for their own profit, to their rich CEOs and to buy off our senators and representatives. THEN, they pay less and less in income tax every year and even get some subsidies from the U. S. national government.  Let's get rid of ALL health insurance companies and let the citizens and medical industry of the United States collectively provide the care we need through a PUBLIC - not OPTION - but SERVICE - like Medicare for All - and really provide for our nation’s general welfare.

After all, no national resource is of more importance to any industralized nation that the health of its workforce.  And THAT is too important to be left to any private company that MUST continue to increase their profit every quarter of every year.

John Womack.