DEAR EDITOR:

You’re a locally important civic leader with formal authority in your organization and significant influence outside of it.

You see the rescission of Obamacare for millions of Americans as a complicating factor with unknown consequences for your thinking about health care.

How should you think? What should you and your colleagues in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys’ civic leadership do?

Consider this. Approach your colleagues and ask for their public support in proposing the Chief Actuary in the Health Care Financing Administration conduct an investigation into the origin, nature, meaning, and consequences of America’s unique employer-paid group health insurance.

Here’s what I wrote last year.

“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.”

“The Chief Actuary and his team are to produce a 200-pp. 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.”

Obamacare’s detractors argued it was flawed. Fair enough. But, have those same critics ever trained their eyes on America’s unique employer-paid group health insurance? Group health gave American businesses a split personality. Are they untaxed charity schemes for insurer-defined populations? Are they enterprises that provide goods and services? Are they both? Neither?

Obamacare’s opponents argued its costs meant more unsavory borrowing from Mainland China. But, group health’s massive and unrecognized excise tax on labor sends whole factories to China. Plus, group health presents with unacknowledged radical queue-jumping, and whole rafts of other publicly unexamined ills.

Recall John Godfrey Saxe’s 19th century poem from your school days? Saxe’s “wise men of Indostan” were blind, they arrogantly made their judgments of the elephant with only one of their remaining senses, and they were heedless of their limited perception. They confidently argued about the nature of the elephant, and got it wrong. Every. Single. Time. We need more free speech to see the health care elephant with all our senses, and to get things right.

Run an open letter in local newspapers appealing for that Chief Actuary study to put health care debate on a level playing field. Get individual and institutional endorsements, signatures and affiliations. Cultivate your own critical cast of mind and proposal language. Develop a follow-through strategy.

What’s the point? Tell the American public the truth about employer-paid group health, then let them decide what direction they want to take toward their health care future.

JACK LABUSCH

Niles