U.S. should fund health care through tax

Affordable universal health care absorbing Medicare, Medicaid, etc., is the only viable option for return to an economical health care system. Outlays should be fully funded by current tax revenues with discontinuance of redundant insurance programs. Enactment of Medicare/Medicaid in the 1960s and out-of-control acceleration of insurance premiums precipitated the explosion of health care costs. Funding health care by insurance, not taxation, is a regressive device favoring the wealthy. Restructuring national health care costs entails installing a systematic normative per-unit cost pattern across the nation for all health-care components. If tax revenues are insufficient, cost parameters should be reduced accordingly. Universal national health care is a controlled pay-as-you-go system.

Understanding the existential national requirement of substituting taxation resources for an amorphous myriad variable and counterproductive insurance plans is the Rosetta stone of unlocking the dark secret of our health care financial crisis with the serendipitous result of mitigating our seemingly insoluble national budget crisis.

Unrestrained excesses during the past half-century of the medical industry and insurance conglomerates endured by a long subdued body politic and government requires the rational response of a fully nationalized health care apparatus for national survival.

George Black

Iowa City