DEAR EDITOR:

Columnist and university intellectual Victor Davis Hanson writes of the “Four horsemen of the Western apocalypse,” policies and behaviors Hanson regards as destructive of Western society. He lists those policies and behaviors, such as excessive “green mandates”, and offers explanatory language for their ill consequences and their origins among America’s “demi-god” elites.

To Hanson’s list I want to add America’s unique group health insurance. Group health has been described to me by very savvy experts as: un-American, un-Christian, anti-worker, anti-organized labor, anti-capital, anti-family, anti-innovation (i.e., “job lock”), anti-economics, anti-morality, revolutionary and radicalizing and much more.

The upstream advantages of group health to its beneficiaries are astounding. The downstream disadvantages of group health to everyone are catastrophically radical and well-concealed by the very “demi-god” elites Hanson identifies, who believe “that they [are] exempt from any consequences of their failure.” A strange template of distribution, group health has long been protected by its vast money power, which has muzzled and marginalized expert critics for generations.

That’s why it’s important for traditional electronic and print media to exercise their fullest powers of journalistic inquiry and editorial freedom to drill down to bedrock and examine group health’s workings, and to restore fact and reality to health care debate. Individual citizens, too, ought to try and make sense of the health care universe they live in through journaling, blog commenting, Facebook posts and the like.

JACK LABUSCH

Niles