We can do better than current health care

In his Nov. 14 letter, “We must allow the free market to work,” Republican congressional candidate Rod Blum calls for the country to turn to “the miracle of the free market” to solve our health care problems. What Blum doesn't mention is that the centerpieces of “Obamacare,” the individual mandate and insurance exchanges, were originally GOP/conservative proposals to supposedly do just that.

The individual mandate was proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1980s and was pushed by Newt Gingrich during the health care debates of the Clinton years. And you can go online and find video clips of Chuck Grassley and other Republicans advocating the individual mandate as recently as 2009. Apparently, it morphed into “tyrannical big-government socialism” only when Obama decided he was for it too.

Fact is, America already has the most free market-based health care system in the industrialized world. And we pay much more for health care than other industrialized countries do, with, by most measurable criteria, some of the worst results. We can do better than that.

Cary Wiesner

West Branch