To the editor:

Let’s hand it to health insurance companies. They’ve managed to convince many that surrendering 25 percent of health care dollars to profit-driven marketing is better than national health insurance. What health benefit do these companies provide for that 25 percent? According to the Washington Post (June 4, 2009), two-thirds of all bankruptcies have been linked to medical expenses, and of those, 80 percent had health insurance.

The health insurance industry has become 16 percent of the U.S. economy. In the 1800s, slavery also represented about 16 percent of the U.S. economy, with the numbers of slaves at about 15.4 percent of the population. (See Stewart’s “African Americans in the U.S. Economy” and Pollitzer’s “Gullah People and African Heritage.”) According to 2009 census figures, 15.4 percent of the U.S. population is uninsured.

In 2008, the CDC warned that 250,000 Americans have HIV and don’t know it. Some U.S. lawmakers still haven’t acknowledged that the most important infrastructure and most basic national defense is a healthy nation.

An expert recently opined that some vague sense of “Liberty” is why Americans do not have single-payer health insurance. Would you choose to be free of government involvement in health care financing even when this produces poorer results? If it is liberty which allows for-profit health insurance companies to be the only choice, who needs tyranny? That yearning for liberty, which so defines our national character, started out by recognizing tyrants and wishing to be free of them.