Letters to the Editor

What's more horrifying, HMOs or the alternative? Plus: Nothing new about Jewish athletes; was Baltimore election about race?

Letters to the Editor

Oct 21, 1999 | Woe is HMO
BY DAWN MacKEEN
(10/14/99)

Advocates for socialized medicine were defeated several years ago in their first attempt at a government takeover of our health-care system. Learning that the public won't accept such a proposal all at once, they have shrewdly changed their strategy. The goal now seems to be to slip socialized medicine in the back door by making private health insurance as expensive as possible. When this happens, more will go uninsured, and more will clamor for the government to "do something." Regardless of what the different varieties of health-care reform may provide, anything that makes health insurance more expensive will move us closer to a government-financed and controlled health-care system. If dealing with the bureaucrats at an HMO is difficult now, I shudder to think about having to get approval from Washingtom for a medical procedure.

-- Brad Beebe

If the Hillary-backed health-care-reform legislation had passed several years ago, the HMOs would have been on a choke collar and abuses such as those described in this story might not have happened. The reason this legislation didn't pass was that not enough people voted in 1992. Precedent shows that when turnout is low, Republicans -- and their "free-market" philosophies, which largely reject any meaningful overhaul of the health-care system -- most often win.

Should "Clinton fatigue" causes non-voters to keep away and soccer moms to vote for George W. in 2000, it will only get worse. The non-voters are so alienated and apathetic they are beyond hope. For things to change, maybe it will take managed-care callousness to become so endemic and prices to rise so high that some investments-addicted, social Darwinist, suburban "independent" voters will have to cash in some of their precious 401Ks to pay for decent care for themselves or the ones they love.

-- Russell Shaw
Portland, Ore.

You should have used a better example for your article than baby Elizabeth Wooldridge. Since the test only cost $125, if I were the parent, I would have begged, borrowed or stolen the money. If both of these parents got an evening job at $5 an hour, working 20 hours a week slinging hamburgers or something, they would have had the money in no time.

I don't blame them for suing their HMO, but they should have attacked the problem as soon as they found out the money for the test would not be forthcoming from the HMO.

-- Myrtle Clark

I can well understand the difficulties the people in this piece faced. However, it seems every single one of these cases was an ultra-serious disease, the type that probably account for a tiny percentage of the medical care rendered by the HMO industry.

My wife and I have belonged to an HMO for about seven years, both private and through Medicare, and we can say in complete honesty that we have never had better medical care in our entire lives. We have never been denied referrals to specialists. We have never been denied emergency room care, drugs, diagnostic tests, X-rays, MRIs, etc. Maybe we are just lucky in using the right HMO, but as far as we are concerned, this is the only way to go. It is a perfect match for us.

-- Sol Gordon
Tamarac, Fla.

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