To the Editor:
It would be just as wrong for the government to compete with private insurers to provide health insurance as it would be for the government to compete with G.M. or Ford to build taxpayer-subsidized “public automobiles.”
The unfair competition from a public plan would destroy the private health insurance industry. The inevitable result would be the rationing and other horrors of a Canadian-style single-payer system, which most Americans neither wish nor deserve.
Paul Hsieh
Sedalia, Colo., March 25, 2009
The writer, a medical doctor, is a co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine.
Note from KBJ: That this man is a medical doctor is irrelevant to his argument. Nothing in his letter draws upon his medical expertise. His credentials, therefore, should have been omitted. By putting them in, the editors of the New York Times invite people to commit the fallacious appeal to authority. Having said that, I agree with the man's (not the doctor's) argument.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 