Health and personal choices

Insurance

Regarding “GOP regrouping may spark compromises” (Page A19, Wednesday), columnist Kathleen Parker raises a question often asked in discussions about health insurance. She asks why a 30-year-old who eats healthy, does not drink, take drugs or smoke and who runs three miles a day should be asked to pay premiums to treat those whose poor health is due to smoking, drinking, overeating or taking drugs. She says, “I am sorry if this sounds heartless; the brain calls it reality.”

What do you want to bet that her hypothetical clean-living 30-year-old texts while driving? The reality is that very many choices affect health, such as getting pregnant, playing football, keeping a loaded handgun, exceeding speed limits, not wearing seatbelts, not getting enough sleep, working stressful jobs, riding motorcycles, not seeing a dentist regularly, and using power tools.

If no health conditions potentially affected by personal choice are to be covered, then obviously there can be no health insurance of any sort.

Further, alcoholism and drug abuse are rightly described as diseases of despair because they disproportionately affect communities, such as rural whites, whose economic prospects have sharply declined. Will Parker’s judgmental and punitive approach improve this situation? Finally, Parker appears oblivious to another reality, namely, that if people get sicker, the loss in productivity and tax revenue and the strain on social and health care services will drag down everyone, including the healthiest. Keith M. Parsons, Friendswood

Main problem

Trumpcare, Cruzcare and even Obamacare will all ultimately fail to deliver health care to the American people. This will be because they all fail to address the one fundamental problem with health care in America.

The problem is that health care here is no longer a public service, like it is in the rest of the developed world. In America it has become a source of wealth. Pharma, the insurance companies, hospitals and the American Medical Association, which is really just a very effective union, all operate to maximize their profits from a broken system.

Though the problem is easy to see, it’s hard to fix when those entrenched interests own the U.S. Congress.

A good start to a fix would be to quit framing this debate as access to health insurance. Health insurance companies are nothing but bureaucracies with a profit motive. They add nothing of value and deliver no services. Reframing this as access to health care might result in the removal of one layer of greed from the system. Bruce R. Bodson, Missouri City