Healthcare costs give automakers a pain

Re “There’s a lot riding on GM and Ford,” Opinion, Feb. 4

Harley Shaiken mentions that U.S. automakers have to spend $1,200 per vehicle for employee healthcare costs while foreign makers average only $450. Never mentioned is that although the typical CEO of a Japanese company earns about 10 times what the average employee makes, U.S. CEOs make about 500 times what theirs make. And the exorbitant severance and retirement packages of executives could go a long way toward paying some of that $1,200 per vehicle. Further, if we in America weren’t paying so much of our healthcare dollars to insurance companies, and twice as much for prescription drugs as other industrialized nations, healthcare for American workers wouldn’t be so expensive.

ALEX MURRAY

Altadena

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Shaiken has the socialist’s answer for our auto-laggards -- national health insurance. Voila! Now we can look forward to a medical system as dismal as Canada’s or Britain’s while saddling America’s middle-class workers and small businesses with more obscene confiscatory taxes. In the last half-century, our country has seen the virtual demise of its steel, electronic and now its auto industry and, wonder of wonders, we’re still here.

Foreign automakers have prevailed in U.S. markets in the face of stifling tariffs and “Buy American” slogans while ours dozed at the wheel. The cure for GM and Ford: Build a better product, not the national dole.

The federal government should spend less than 1% of the cost of national health insurance on an education program of applied preventive medicine that may well produce a healthy populace in the next half-century -- an individual responsibility concept totally lost on Shaiken and his ilk.

STUART WEISS

Beverly Hills