To the editor:

If you buy insurance of any type — health, automobile, or life Insurance — you place one of the most curious of all bets, you bet that something bad will happen to you. With health insurance you bet that you will get sick. With automobile insurance you bet you will have an accident or that you will cause an accident. When you buy life insurance you bet that you will die.

Insurance companies let us bet against ourselves and pretend they are there to help us. The truth is that they are there to make a profit.

That is the only reason they exist.

Insurance companies — what gamblers call bookies — bet that bad things will not happen to you, and they make huge profits on this kind of gambling.

Like good bookies, insurance companies use numbers to set the odds in their favor. They take in bets called insurance premiums based on the odds they calculate from information you give them. They pay off the winners: people with bad luck. They pocket what is left.

Medicare, a government run insurance program, operates with about a 3 percent overhead that pays the expense of running the program.

Private health insurance has about a 30 percent overhead. Just like Mafia overlords, the salaries of top insurance executives are obscene.

If you love bureaucracy you must love private health insurance companies. Unfortunately, they have the money and the political power to prevent change.

Single payer (government) heathcare systems work well all around the world. In America, we continue to bet against ourselves claiming that we have the best healthcare system in the world. Indeed, we have wonderful medicine, but access to it is largely controlled by non-medical gangs of profiteers.

It is time for a change, time to put an end to the protection racket.

Julian Taber, Ph.D.

Coupeville