To the editor:

The Economic Report of the President, released last week and available at www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/index.html, provides the current administration’s perspective on the health care financing crisis.

A key point in Chapter 10 — covering the roles of innovation, insurance and reform in the health care market — notes that overreliance on health insurance as a payment mechanism leads to an inefficient use of resources in providing and utilizing health care. The message, apparently, for Americans struggling to pay health insurance premiums or going without health coverage: Insurance is overused anyway — you should pay for health care services on your own.

Additionally, although at any given time about one in seven Americans is uninsured, the report minimizes the problem, noting that “the uninsured are a diverse and perpetually changing group.” So, essentially, if a person has health insurance coverage for at least part of the year, that should be sufficient.

This information should be important to families preparing their income tax returns. As citizens of the only industrialized nation in the world lacking a national health program, we should be thinking about where our tax dollars go and what they buy for us.

Dot Nary,

Lawrence