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DEAR EDITOR:
Will a conference of health care free speechers further the idea that getting health care for sick people in a timely and effective way is a good thing?
The idea seems simple. Assemble health care free speechers, such as select academics, legal scholars, corporate media, independent citizen-journalists, activists, and others. See if they can reach consensus -- about some aspect of their health care criticisms.
The premise behind the conference is that America's marketplace of ideas in health care debate is extinct, and we need to do something to revive it. Individuals and institutions that might have once been expected to offer measured dissent to some health care wrongness have been muzzled or "rhetorically captured" by powerful interests, much like "regulatory capture" of government by those it purportedly regulates is said to have puppetized government to serve private interests.
The drawbacks are that conferences take organizational skill, time, and need to offer specific benefits to those attending. Many free speechers have day jobs that need to be considered by organizers. Free speechers who focus on issues other than distribution, such as autism truth, need a fair shake, too.
If and when a conference consensus is reached, there'd have to be thought given to follow-through. I sort of guardedly favor legislation that empowers the Chief Actuary to expose how radically subversive group health insurance is, but that's a debate for another time. I'd just scratched the surface of that wicked group health idea.
Why not just turn your head away and let health care events run their course until some new equilibrium is found? That's a good question. I can't answer it. A quick story, though. The Vietnamese embassy kindly sent me two fine volumes years ago on the Vietnam War, what they call the American War. The books answered my question of why North Vietnam was so dilatory at the Paris peace talks. Answer? North Vietnam already knew it had won the war.
Diplomat George Ball and journalist Bernard Fall spoke truth to power well before those Paris talks, and warned early against American intervention in Vietnam. They seem to me good models of measured dissent in an America gone wrong, and men who free speechers can emulate on health care issues.
A word to future health care dissidents: study mathematics and the logic of casuistry, case-based reasoning. Think of both as direction-finding equipment that tells you how badly lost we really are, and how misled by our demi-god elites we've been on health care the past eighty years.
Free speechers will have to decide among themselves whether there's merit in getting together. If, as, and when that happens, there ought to be good opportunities for positive demonstrations, street-corner debate, and the forming of informal coalitions for the future.
JACK LABUSCH
Niles