Why should you join America’s health care free speech movement?

You may have already enlisted if you’ve had the gnawing feeling that the well-known patterns of health care debate conceal some as yet unrevealed primal reality that block important issues from being joined. You’d be right.

There may be a few thousand people nationwide who are occasional health care free speechers, although they don’t call themselves that. Among them are a few lawyers, some academics, a handful of medical doctors, and independent theoreticians and citizen-dissenters.

Consider this: historians and legal scholars will not be kind to today’s America that has allowed a permissive environment for needless early deaths, gratuitous suffering, and massive economic dislocation cloaked beneath the commonplace rhetoric of labor-management relations and insurer-provider-beneficiary contentiousness.

Even now there are a handful of experts who speculate among trusted colleagues about whether the distribution of health care since the 1970s may be regarded as a conspiracy with definable but as yet unacknowledged criminal elements. The 1970s had the medically indigent displaced by the medically uninsured, a new medical underclass artificially created by the 89th Congress when it passed the original Medicare and Medicaid bill a decade earlier.

Workers in that new underclass were forced by law to pay directly for Medicare and Medicaid, from which most could not benefit as needed, and were forced to indirectly subsidize group health insurance for others, too, from which they were denied enrollment. The new medical underclass was to help pay for the relatively health care-rich medical overclass. The 89th Congress’s feat of social engineering spelled pure evil.

Why didn’t our universities warn us of these dangerous ideas, beginning thirty years earlier when many businesses imposed the Soviet-inspired group health insurance template upon the American public.

Academic censorship, self-censorship, research fraud, and suppression of whole lines of inquiry are real at our universities, according to knowledgeable insiders with relevant subject matter expertise.

Is health insurance an academic no-go zone? I think that question may best be asked of subpoenaed university presidents and university provosts under oath on national television by a motivated and informed joint House-Senate select committee on health insurance investigation.

The answers to those questions are likely straightforward, but it will take the force of a congressional inquiry to question in detail our universities’ willful refusal to meaningfully examine health insurance, and how that refusal has subverted time and again our ability to make good, transparent decisions about our health care future.

You say you’re not ready yet to stick your neck out to ransom American health care debate from the blackguards, nitwits, and special pleaders who’ve controlled that debate generation after generation. Fair enough.

Try this before you decide. Keep a journal, a “zibaldone” of health care observations. You’re edifying yourself by gathering data on elite and popular thought about health care.

Record highlights of conversations at the drug store, doctor’s office, workplace, clubhouse, and professional gathering. Note unusual health care-related billboards, office signs, television and radio commercials. Clip newspaper and magazine articles, glue-stick them into your journal, and add your own immediate comment. Summarize interviews with and speeches of public health care figures.

Record what seems to be interesting, important, and controversial. Be satisfied with fragmentary notes, and your own immediate, fragmentary comments. You can refresh your memory later.

Let the evidence in your notes paint the picture. Reserve judgment. Don’t think outside the box. Huh? You can’t be sure where the box is yet.

Act. Write letters to your representatives and senators, and to other public officials. Lobby institutional leaders. Raise questions at board meetings, and union meetings. Pose questions in paid display ads. Challenge contenders to public debate.

Create a dedicated Facebook page for your health care issue. Comment on blogs and Webzines, and write letters and essays. Participate in health care demonstrations. Carry signs, do videography, write cue cards for media sound bites. Do street theater, recite verse at poetry slams.

Jack Labusch is a semi-retired technical writer, and the author of a manuscript, “‘Blackout: How Our Unique Group Health Insurance Destroyed Your Mind and Ruined America.”