DEAR EDITOR:

Here’s an alternative to a House-Senate inquiry into group health insurance that offers elected officials political cover to protect their re-election bids and future lobbying careers.

Congress must appropriate the money and direct the President to instruct the Chief Actuary in the Health Care Financing Administration to embark on a special project for the benefit of the American public.

The Chief Actuary is to recruit carefully selected experts in mathematics, economics, accounting, social psychology, mass media, organizational behavior, Soviet domestic policy, public opinion, demographics, theology, history, book illustration, and technical drawing. Lawyers, too, experts in criminal law, anti-trust, tax, charity, family, employment, and labor law, and legal theorists.

Hiring incentives should be strong, pay generous, and, likewise, a good severance. The experts must be sworn to secrecy. There must be guarantees for the personal safety of the experts and their families.

The Chief Actuary and his team are to produce a 200-page book, The Construction and Uses of Health Insurance Groups and Health Insurance Null Groups, written for a reasonably educated, popular readership. Distribution is to be to every household in America, every corporation, every lobbyist, every elected official, and others as the President may direct.

Why? Widely believed to insure workers and their families, group health insures neither, and invisibly undermines both work and family as primal templates of economic distribution. Organized labor claims credit for group health, but group health was a management initiative for its reasons. Group health is thought to be compensation for work, yet more than one-third of group health enrollees don’t work for the company that bankrolls their insurance.

This massively false consciousness of the nature of group health insurance may help explain why insured Americans have been quietly radicalized to believe what’s not true. Many insured Americans see themselves as victims of greedy insurers despite the nearly $1 trillion annually spent on their behalf, the premiums for which are employer-subsidized typically at 75% and often more.

Almost no one, except for a few courageous experts, actually knows what group health insurance is. That’s why group health is too hot to handle for popular and elite opinion without help from the Chief Actuary and his team. That’s also why group health is a threat to democracy. Group health’s money power is just too strong.

The Chief Actuary can begin his work as early as the 2026 fiscal year. His special project will need the support of senators and representatives who understand the restoration of truth in health care debate means the government will have to nurture that truth in secrecy.

JACK LABUSCH

Niles