Letter: Pyle right and wrong on Obamacare

George Pyle has hit the health care nail on the head twice now: once when he said the Republicans were more afraid that "Obamacare" would succeed than that it would fail, and second when he pointed out ("In Obamacare battle, it's dogma vs data ," Opinion, Nov. 1) that the problem with ACA is that it doesn't do enough.

Every other civilized country in the world has universal health care. How can we explain to the world that we don't believe in a civilized community, one that provides society with roads, education, electricity and health care? As he says, "the founding cry of the whole tea party movement, [is] that civilization is a bad idea."

My only difference with him is in the exact manner of how easy it would have been to provide universal health care. He claims that none of the responsible actors "had the power to do the right thing," by which he means trashing the whole bloated insurance industry in favor of a single national health insurance.

But in fact, the insurance industry would have benefited greatly from a tax for national health coverage with an exemption for premiums paid to private insurers.

That is essentially what we got except for the complication of having to go to private insurers through the exchange system that seems to be bedeviling some computer programmers.

Wayne McCormack

E.W. Thode Professor of Law

University of Utah

Salt Lake City