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Wednesday, August 31, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
O
P
I N I O
N
Robert B.
Reich
American Voices
Th e school year
has begun.
Please watch
for kids and
drive carefully.
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be
no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday.
To the Editor:
The letters in the August 24 Nugget written
by Jensen Newton and Larry Benson illustrate
the main problem facing people of color in the
U.S. with regards to racial bias in law enforce-
ment: denial. Specifically, denial by people
who enjoy white privilege.
Despite numerous videos explicitly show-
ing — on major news outlets — beatings,
choking and extrajudicial killings of law-abid-
ing black people by rogue police officers, the
two letter-writers insist that no injustice has
ever occurred. Instead, they attempt to paint
Black Lives Matter — a group that espouses
peaceful civil disobedience— as a violent or,
in Mr. Benson’s bewildering view, “anti-capi-
talist” group.
Just because an anarchistic element has
sometimes infiltrated Black Lives Matter’s
demonstrations to perpetrate violence and
property crime doesn’t mean Black Lives
Matter supports their actions. Do the few
Republicans who have attacked people
at Donald Trump’s rallies prove that the
Republican Party is violent? Of course not.
To be sure, police are justified with using
deadly force when faced with a violent crimi-
nal, whether black, white, Hispanic, Asian,
Native American or any other ethnicity. But
it’s become disturbingly clear lately that
there is widespread racial bias entrenched
in many urban police forces, and unjustified
and excessive use of force is frequently being
used in policing many black and Hispanic
neighborhoods.
According to www.mappingpoliceviolence.
org, police killed more than 100 unarmed
black people in 2015 alone. Unarmed black
people were killed at five times the rate of
unarmed whites in 2015.
It’s easy to overlook or deny these facts if
you’re white. People who are white — myself
included — have no idea of the degree and
frequency of discrimination people of color
face, potentially with deadly consequence, in
their daily lives. Thanks to Bonnie Malone for
See lETTERS on page 12
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The best argument for
a single-payer health care
plan is the recent decision
by giant health insurer Aetna
to bail out next year from 11
of the 15 states where it sells
Obamacare plans.
Aetna’s decision fol-
lows similar moves by
UnitedHealth Group, the
nation’s largest health
insurer, and by Humana,
another one of the giants.
All claim they’re not
making enough money
because too many people
with serious health problems
are using the Obamacare
exchanges, and not enough
healthy people are signing
up.
T h e p r o b l e m i s n ’t
Obamacare per se. It lies in
the structure of private mar-
kets for health insurance,
which creates powerful
incentives to avoid sick peo-
ple and attract healthy ones.
Obamacare is just making
this structural problem more
obvious.
In a nutshell, the more
sick people and the fewer
healthy people a private for-
profit insurer attracts, the
less competitive that insurer
becomes relative to other
insurers that don’t attract as
high a percentage of the sick
but a higher percentage of
the healthy.
Eventually, insurers that
take in too many sick people
and too few healthy people
are driven out of business.
If insurers had no idea
who’d be sick and who’d be
healthy when they sign up
for insurance (and keep them
insured at the same price
even after they become sick),
this wouldn’t be a problem.
But they do know — and
they’re developing more and
more sophisticated ways of
finding out.
Health insurers spend lots
of time, effort and money
trying to attract people who
have high odds of staying
healthy (the young and the
fit) while doing whatever
they can to fend off those
who have high odds of get-
ting sick (the older, infirm
and the unfit).
As a result, we end
up with the most bizarre
health-insurance system
imaginable: one ever bet-
ter designed to avoid sick
people.
If this weren’t enough to
convince rational people to
do what most other advanced
nations have done — create
a single-payer system that
insures everyone, funded
by taxpayers — consider
that America’s giant health
insurers are now busily con-
solidating into ever-larger
behemoths.
UnitedHealth is already
humongous. Aetna, mean-
while, is trying to buy
Humana in a deal that will
create the second-largest
health insurer in the nation,
with 33 million members.
The Justice Department has
so far blocked the deal.
Insurers say they’re con-
solidating in order to reap
economies of scale. But
there’s little evidence that
large size generates cost
savings.
In reality, they’re becom-
ing huge to get more bar-
gaining leverage over every-
one they do business with:
hospitals, doctors, employ-
ers, the government and con-
sumers. That way they make
even bigger profits.
But these bigger prof-
its come at the expense of
hospitals, doctors, employ-
ers, the government and,
ultimately, taxpayers and
consumers.
There’s abundant evi-
dence that when health
insurers merge, premiums
rise. Researchers found, for
example, that after Aetna
merged with Prudential
HealthCare in 1999, premi-
ums rose 7 percent higher
than had the merger not
occurred.
What to do? In the
short term, Obamacare can
be patched up by enlarg-
ing government subsidies
for purchasing insurance,
and ensuring that healthy
Americans buy insurance, as
the law requires.
But these are Band-Aids.
The real choice in the future
is either a hugely expensive
for-profit oligopoly with the
market power to charge high
prices even to healthy people
and to stop insuring sick peo-
ple, or else a government-run
single payer system—such
as is in place in almost every
other advanced economy—
dedicated to lower premiums
and better care for everyone.
We’re going to have to
choose eventually.
© 2016 By Robert Reich;
Distributed by Tribune
Content Agency, LLC
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.