“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
The quote above is from Mahatma Gandhi and it described how his movement eventually achieved victory. Apparently, although we skipped the ridicule part, from reading the pages of the Albuquerque Journal, we at the Rio Grande Foundation must be getting close to victory. After all, our opponents are fighting us and our ideas harder than ever. Why else would readers attack us three times in published letters during just the past week? To me, that seems to indicate a high level of effectiveness and proximity to victory.
First, on Monday, a reader wrote this letter in response to my recent article on “Health Care for All.” Yesterday, I picked up the paper only to see a reader attempt to discredit another organization, CARE, through their association with us. In a letter entitled, “Jimmy Carter Had It Right,” Marita K. Noon’s commentary “Green on the Surface, Dirty Underneath,” is fitting for the executive director of the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy — an ally of the Rio Grande Foundation.
Lastly, in today’s paper, a letter writer again decries our opposition to “Medicare for All,” stating:
“Think Tank Needs To Get Real on Need for Health-Care Reform”
THINK-TANK ESSAYS on real-life issues are always interesting to read but are generally lacking in usefulness, and Paul Gessing’s recent op-ed on health-care reform is no exception. He suggests that we limit the government’s role in the health-care industry in order to “ restore the doctor-patient relationship by empowering consumers to shop around for the highest quality care at the best price.”
Where is he? When I had health insurance, the company would send me a list of approved doctors, hospitals and pharmacies that they had already forged working agreements with and that would guarantee their profitability but not my satisfaction.
I currently have no health insurance because the last company I had a relationship with gave me an offer of $800 a month, with a $50 co-pay and a $2,000 deductible. I shopped, but the only others doing business in my area were mysteriously similar in terms and money.
We will get health-care reform. Approximately 48 million Americans have no health care, and millions more have it but can’t afford to use it. I will guess that when the uninsured number reaches 100 million, in say seven years, the medical-industrial complex will realize that they have priced themselves out of the market and that there are no more new customers to be had.
They will then run panic-stricken to the federal government and beg for a bailout. They will then call it health-care reform.
The writer seems to believe that our opposition to government-run health care results from alleged support of the insurance industry as it currently exists and functions. This could not be further from the truth. The key to free market health care and reforming the existing system is to do away with the third-party-payer system which places undue emphasis on health insurance companies. Insurance should play a role that is limited to true insurance and should not be the first place we go when Americans seek health care.