Single-payer health insurance makes sense

Matt Himsl, a long-time state senator from Kalispell, had a great influence on my political thinking. Beginning in my teen years, I spent many enriching hours exploring ideas with him.

Matt presided over the Flathead County Republican Central Committee for more than a decade. He was a Goldwater delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention, and chaired the Montana effort to nominate Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in 1968. In Flathead County, he was "Mr. Republican."

In dramatic contrast to most present-day Republicans, he was an advocate of what today would be called a 'single-payer" health-care system. Matt told me this about 30 years ago, after a life-threatening experience with cancer.

He said that he was a cancer survivor because he had been able to afford health care. He shared with me his belief that it was wrong in our great and civilized country that health care was not available to all Americans, and he told me the only way that could be accomplished was through government.

I became pretty well convinced of this point of view a few years later when I hired a small contractor with a reputation as an excellent workman to install a chain link fence around my yard. He was missing some teeth and was self conscious about his appearance. He brought this up to me and told me there was no way he could afford the dental work he needed. He went on to say that he had painful stomach ulcers and was unable to afford medical attention for them.

As a teacher, I had medical insurance. I shudder to think what my fence would have looked like if left up to my handyman skills. So how was it right, I thought, that this man had to suffer in a dehumanizing way when he was as hard-working a member of society as me, because his way of making a living didn't allow him into our health-care 'system" like mine did.

Today, an estimated 46 million Americans have no health insurance, and many who do are inadequately covered and barely able to pay for what coverage they have. It is estimated that one-fourth of what we currently pay for health insurance in the United States goes to insurance companies.

Health insurance is not health care, and that is why people in other countries pay far less for universal medical care than we pay for our discriminating hodge-podge of health insurance.

It is said by those who defend the existing health-care system that surveys show most people are happy with the health care they have now. Most of us are happy with our physician and have confidence in our local hospital. That doesn't mean we are happy with the inefficient and costly way in which access to them is provided.

It is also said that a "public option" to privately provided health insurance would put the private providers out of business. Well then, how has the United Parcel Service been able to survive in competition with the U.S. postal system?

Competition has improved service and efficiency for both UPS and the postal system. It would have the same effect in health care, but in doing so would cut into the profit margin, encroaching on multimillion-dollar salaries and bonuses of insurance-industry executives.

That is what the private insurers are afraid of, and that is what they are counting on their surgically-targeted political contributions to protect. The competitive struggle in providing health care for all our citizens would lead to lower costs and better quality. What a concept. What are we waiting for?

Bob Brown is a former Montana State Senate President and Secretary of State.