DEAR EDITOR:

“Health Care Free Speech.”

That’s the sign I took to the No Kings rally. The hostage-taking of sick people by the Republicans to extort political concessions from the Democrats seems to me unsavory in an America that claims kinship with Western civilization. I wanted to make a statement.

I’m sort of sympathetic to the MAGA grassroots folks. I get the alienation. President Trump has done some good things. But, I vote Libertarian and think libertarian in a non-libertarian America. No Kings was sponsored by Democrats, to whom I’m grateful.

I put a sticky note on my sign in case a reporter asked me for a word. “Health care free speech,” I’d say, “means we’ve had 80 years of health care money speech, talking about schemes piled atop schemes. Now we need health care free speech to get to health care truth speech.”

I’d written hundreds of health care-related essays the past 20-some years. Many of us health care free speechers know “the big flinch.” We expect the distribution of health care to be consistent with recognizable patterns we understand from experience and education. We look for those patterns in health care. Those patterns don’t exist — that’s the big flinch. What we do see, health care free speechers privately admit, is cruelty and madness.

One example: Does health care teach the rich to falsely envy the poor? Well-insured Dave sought free health care he believed was enjoyed by Bob, an uninsured worker he resented for his health care social parasitism. Dave went to a government clinic, produced his group health card, and paid a co-pay. Miffed, he’d expected to pay nothing at all.

Unknown to Dave, Bob, the uninsured worker, had been means-tested out of four government programs, ignored by his union and employer, feared the ER’s wage garnishment, then began wetting himself from undiagnosed and untreated diabetes. Stranger still, Dave didn’t work at all. He was an unemployed, adult-aged qualifying dependent of well-employed parents who paid nothing to the cost of premiums.

Is this nuts? Blame our demi-god elites. When they engineered a radically new health beneficiary population carved from selected worker populations and family populations, they ignored group health’s massive dark side. That’s why we need a major national civic education initiative to put health care debate on an honest footing.

Are you running for Congress in 2026? Make “health care free speech” your own doorbuster slogan to broaden and deepen health care debate.

JACK LABUSCH

Niles