To the Editor:
Re “Real Challenge to Health Bill: Selling Reform” (Economic Scene, front page, July 22):
David Leonhardt says that the “typical person,” one of the 90 percent of voters who already have health insurance, thinks that the Democratic health care plans offer nothing for them except higher taxes.
As one of those 90 percent, I disagree. Beyond thinking that a rich society ought to be able to provide this basic need of life as a matter of course, the main reason to support strong universal health care is personal and family security: removing the weight of vulnerability to misfortune.
This is not just personal: we should not underestimate the corrosive effects of pervasive insecurity on American democracy. The recent trajectory of our society has whole segments seeing an increasingly tenuous hold on a middle-class lifestyle, and health care economic worries are a big part of that. This is a deeply destructive dynamic that bodes poorly for the American project.
Those who can’t conceive of losing their health insurance (which includes members of Congress and most influential political actors, and most of their friends) do not seem to appreciate that widespread personal vulnerability can translate into a caustic political culture.
Avoiding that future concerns me greatly, even though I myself have no worry about my own insurance.
William S. Kessler
Seattle, July 22, 2009
Note from KBJ: The letter writer hates "pervasive insecurity." I love pervasive insecurity. It is the engine of prosperity. The opposite of insecurity, namely security, is the engine of the opposite of prosperity, namely poverty. Perhaps the letter writer could use a lesson in the history of American business. Better yet, he should read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776).
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 