One was written by a local couple – Thomas Clairmont, M.D. and Pamela Clairmont, R.N. (Clairmont Letter) The other was written by Rachel Nardin, MD, a neurologist who also happens to be an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. (Nardin Story) Each opinion piece was advocating single payer health care – i.e., government paid health care, i.e., grab your wallets.

Neither an MD nor an RN is a degree in economics. Nor does medical training guarantee superior knowledge of
how to cost the health care delivery system. I am fairly certain, given our different occupations, that my wife and I understand the pain of the current method of costing health care better than these three individuals. We also recognize that I am alive and kicking because of the quality of care we purchase.

Dr. Nardin criticizes the new health care legislation in Massachusetts. I, too, see flaws in it, but not the same as she does. She makes a couple of astounding statements that tell me she hasn’t the foggiest about the economics of what she proposes. “79 percent of these newly insured individuals are very poor people enrolled in Medicaid or similar free plans. Virtually all of them were previously eligible for completely free care funded by the state, but face co-payments under the new plan.” There is no such animal as free health care. You and I pay every penny, through taxes and our own insurance premiums. And in any single payer system, you and I will still pay every penny. The difference is that the notoriously incompetent hand of federal bureaucracy will screw up costs and service delivery as only they can.

I desperately want to believe Nardin and the Clairmonts when they say I would only have to pay a 3% tax to cover all my medical expenses. That pesky 7% business tax would never be passed on to the consumer. Like Dorothy I know I’m not in Kansas anymore, and as I tap my ruby slippers together, I have a few questions that I hope the Clairmonts and Nardin will be able to answer.

Would it be naive of me to think that a government program would get smaller, more efficient, and cheaper as it progressed? Can you think of even one? Me neither.

Would it be naive of me to think that government bureaucrats would be more compassionate than the private insurer bureaucrats? Whom do the Clairmonts or Nardin have in mind as a model – the IRS, perhaps?

Would it be naive of me to think that we are so much smarter than the English, Canadians, and French - that we can avoid the problems of quality and speed that have devastated their state medical systems? Do the Clairmonts and Nardin really not know that those who can in those countries buy private insurance and often come here for sophisticated procedures?

Would it be naive of me to think that by watching a Michael Moore propaganda film as suggested by the Clairmonts, that like the proverbial maiden, all my prayers will be answered? I did not know Moore had degrees in medicine and economics. Silly me.

It would be naive of me to think that, given the current political atmosphere, politicians of both stripes are going to sit down together and not screw things up. Both Republicans and Democrats are salivating at the prospect of ingratiating themselves with another “free” giveaway program. The legislation will be a thousand pages of gobbledygook that will only become clear when we have been robbed down to our skivvies by “universal, free health care.”