LETTERS
Re: “Uninsured, Unafraid” (Sept. 21): It’s very nice that J. Duncan Moore Jr. has decided that the $6,000 or so he is saving every year will pay for any care he might need in the future. Let me ask, if a drunk driver knocks you off your bike and you end up on a respirator, would you like me or other insured people or taxpayers to take care of you? Or if despite your good health, you suddenly find yourself diagnosed with cancer, would you like someone else to bail you out?
The insurance pool works when it includes high- and low-risk people.
Patricia L. Moore
Los Angeles
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I personally can name many friends and colleagues with good hygiene, healthy habits and no family history of the diseases that changed their lives. Moore’s “savings” of the $6,000 insurance fee would have, if he were lucky, covered one day of these disasters. Perhaps he is right to be unafraid: After his home and all assets are gone, he still won’t have to pay -- I will.
Judith Dubowy
Long Beach
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Moore seems to blithely blow by the always-possible chance of hospitalization, including surgery, by saying some major medical centers offer 15% to 58% discounts for patients who don’t have insurance. Well, it’s been my understanding that daily hospital charges can run in the thousands of dollars, and even common surgeries (e.g., appendectomy, bone setting) also run in the high thousands. Even 58% off those kinds of charges wouldn’t do most of us much good, even if we had saved up by not paying premiums for years.
Jim Gould
Burbank
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Moore’s informative and revelatory essay on the many faults, wickedness, frauds and sins of the health insurers of America was most bracing and tonic, as the saying goes. He knows them all, inside and out.
However, its detailed, self-centered example also tells us that he is single, without children or dependents. In short, he can afford to risk the risks.
Has anyone counted up the number of divorced women with children who have no means at all to acquire insurance, or risk going without? Not to begin to count in many millions more middle-class and desperate folks?
Jascha Kessler
Santa Monica
