Dear Jambar Folks:
The new City Club of the Mahoning Valley ought to consider a speaker who talks about the prospects and rationale for a new constitutional convention.
Why a new con-con? At least one reason is to address the Wall Street/K Street condominium believed by many to exercise actual governance using Congress and the president as its nominees. A related reason is to address the atrophy of citizen-sovereignty, even the consciousness of citizen-sovereignty, which can be seen in the infantilization of whole swaths of journalistic investigation and academic inquiry.
Another reason is to tackle exotic corporate and social fauna, which seemingly can’t be talked about with any robustness under the current governmental system. One of those corporate critters is group health insurance, which I’ve written about at exhausting length, and which no one cares to admit is likely the most radical and destructive domestic idea of the past eighty years.
Jack Labusch
Wikipedia’s “Second Constitutional Conventional” offers a referenced introduction to the subject. I’ll guess that speakers may be few, but they’re likely to be within the price range of a civic forum start-up.
America’s unique group health insurance remains immune from serious criticism. Yet, it amounts to an amazingly costly, politically motivated Third World medical baksheesh scheme that wouldn’t pass economic muster at a Junior Achievement convention.
Has America become an Oriental satrapy masquerading as a Western constitutional republic? Or, Fascism Lite—fewer regulations (probably), less (gratuitous) killing? I don’t know.
The idea that American government is a failure may be a grim message, but I think it’ll be worthwhile for City Club people to hear it. A good speaker can underscore the hidden obstacles that allow bad ideas to flourish while better ideas remain stillborn.
Thanks to “The Jambar” for publishing my note.
At the risk of sock-puppeting my own letter, allow me a last comment before the election.
Look at your group health insurance card. Your group is designated by a numeric or alphanumeric code. What does the group mean, and why is the group such a rotten idea?
YSU’s actuarial science courses will offer gateway tools to help understand why group health insurance is “radical and destructive”. Ditto, direct observation and inferences drawn from them, if you have the courage to accept the very unsavory conclusions you’re led to by this extremely strange idea.
(Ex: Group health insurance unduly depresses both corporate stock prices and workers’ wages—a lose-lose situation if there ever was one. That’s but one example of group health insurance’s little-recognized ill effects. There’re many more. Our leadership castes’ unwillingness to understand how insurance groups subvert our institutions and values seems criminal to me.)
At some point you have to wonder about a nation that can’t figure out whether to get health care for sick people. How difficult can that be?