Case showed need for public health care

I’m glad that Robert Alt, president of the Buckeye Institute, survived his highaltitude pulmonary edema from climbing Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus (Dispatch article, Wednesday), but find his “praise of free market medicine” and criticism of publicly financed health care misleading and ironic.

He should take his ideological blinders off. The real lesson of his ordeal his that we need more public funding for health care and not “free market” solutions.

The hospital in the remote Caucasus that he appears to condemn did not suffer because of some form of socialism: Russia has dramatically cut back on funding health care and introduced “free-market reforms.” Nonetheless the physician in that hospital very likely saved his life.

Unfortunately, efforts underway in Congress would worsen the situation for rural hospitals here in the United States. They rely on public financing and would perish under a totally free-market health system. Medicaid and the expansion of Medicaid that Obamacare delivered to states that accepted it allow those hospitals to provide high-quality care to lowincome people in remote or rural areas as well as cities. Obamacare also had provisions that improved reimbursements to rural hospitals, and helped them link with other systems through electronic records. These measures benefit the entire hospital population and rural communities.

Alt’s takeaway — that his experience showed him the importance of a free-market health-care system — is fatally flawed. The system that we have would fall apart for all of us should Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare be defunded or curtailed. In fact, the system would improve if the inefficiencies of the private-insurance market would be replaced by a single-payer system.

One last note. The expensive private health insurance Alt purchased failed to provide any benefit.

Robert Handelman Columbus