Brigette Russell (2)Last night, northern New Mexico’s Congressman Ben Ray Luján, held a health care town hall at the Unitarian Church in Santa Fe featuring a panel discussion with  health care professionals.

As the news reports will not come out until after my column deadline, I will have to wait to find out whether those health care professionals were good Santa Fe liberals who believe that health care reform is vital and the Democratic plan is just what we need. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

You see, I was not able to attend the town hall, which was announced only a few days ago, because by strange coincidence, it was scheduled for the same evening as  a GOP event at La Posada which I, along with the entire leadership of the Republican Party in Santa Fe, was was already committed to attending.

It’s a good thing I’m not a conspiracy theorist, or I might suspect that it was more than coincidence.

My husband and I divided forces, I going to La Posada and he generously foregoing the fine wine and lovely gardens  to attend Mr. Luján’s townhall — except that when he arrived 40 minutes early the fire marshals were already there turning people away because the crowd had exceeded the building’s capacity.

A conspiracy theorist might conclude that some organization like MoveOn.org had rallied the troops to pack the town hall with sympathetic audience.  A  concerned citizen like myself, however, would of course conclude that this was an issue which concerned my fellow Santa Feans deeply enough that hundreds of them found out at the last minute about a little-publicized meeting and showed up in droves.

I’ve written here before about health care, not once, but twice.  I hesitated to dedicate yet another column to the issue, but decided that it really is too important not to continue discussing, no matter how badly I wanted to write a column advocating a Richards Avenue interchange on I-25.

The other day I read the best article I have read to date about the health care reform issue, and believe me, I’ve read a lot of them.  You may be surprised to learn that it is in The Atlantic and written by a Democrat, David Goldhill.  After reading the title, “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” I thought, here we go with a diatribe about the evils of health care being a commodity not a right, and I almost didn’t read it.  It ran six pages, after all, and I was busy.  I’m very glad I made the time.

After his father died from an infection he contracted in the hospital, Goldhill, understandably, looked for someone to blame.  But he could find no villain.  In the cold light of reason that followed grief, he began to realize

that our collective search for villains — for someone to blame — has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care — from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies — work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that — most important — remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

Exactly. I’ve said more or less the same thing myself at NMI a couple of months ago, though I had neither the space nor, to be honest, the capacity to explain it as Goldhill has. He asks, on page 2,

How often have you heard a politician say that millions of Americans “have no health care,” when he or she meant they have no health insurance? How has a method of financing health care become synonymous with care itself?

Pretty often. Maddeningly often.  He explains how this came to pass.  The explanation is too long for me to block quote, but I urge you to read the article yourself to find out.  Everyone should.  And remember, gentle readers, that Mr. Goldhill is a Democrat.  I’m not referring you to another right-wing “nut job” (to quote my NMI fans) like myself.  It is not partisan rhetoric, but common sense when he states the following:

Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?

Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee — more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else — by ourselves.

His solution, which he admits would cause a difficult period of transition, is outlined on page 6, and contains a healthy dose of government spending to create a safety net so that the destitute do not fall through the cracks.

Despite what you might think, I am not opposed to this.  Our tax dollars already pay for the health care of the destitute. I am all in favor of a system that would require fewer tax dollars to achieve the same — or in all likelihood far better — results.

Nobody — not even Republicans — wants poor people dropping dead in the streets because they can’t pay a doctor.  Okay, maybe some libertarians do.  But I’m not a libertarian.  I’m not opposed to all taxation and all government.

But I am opposed to the disastrously misguided attempt by Congress to “reform” our system of paying for health care.  If any of the committee bills pass, our health care system is going to get worse, not better.

I know at least one person in Ben Ray Luján’s office reads my column. I hope he or she is reading it today, and takes the time to read Mr. Goldhill’s article.  I hope the Congressman himself reads it.  I hope it makes him rethink his preconceptions, makes him think outside the narrow, stultifying Democratic box.

Because if he and enough of his colleauges in Congress do not, the rest of us will pay a very high price.