Just when I thought the socialist streak in The Sun News couldn't get any worse, the lead editorial Sept. 3 ("Would plan work for S.C.?) described the Massachusetts plan for universal health insurance as a good thing while using "mandate" four times and using "redistributes the money," "required to buy health insurance" and "subsidies." The claim that such a scheme will not increase taxes is shown to be false when it is acknowledged that employers will be required to pay the government $295 per employee if the employer doesn't provide group coverage for employees. If that isn't a tax on employers, I don't know what is.

The Massachusetts scheme will last only three years before the tax increases will come. This socialized medicine scheme will turn out to be as expensive as Boston's Big Dig and just as dysfunctional. The current problems with health insurance premiums are already caused by government mandates. It all started when the federal government allowed companies to get tax benefits from paying for health insurance for employees. That disconnected the patient from the cost of health care.

The feds made it worse with diagnosis-related groups, Medicare and Medicaid, which distorted the providers' ability to charge appropriately for health care delivered. The second set of mandates came from the states. These mandates, which vary from state to state, piled on requirements for insurance coverage and disallowed insurance products that provided basic insurance at reasonable premiums based on actuarial risk. Everyone had to buy the Cadillac, no Chevys allowed.

Here's the bottom line: Mandates distort the market and drive up costs. Any health care mandate will lead to tax increases, period. As if that wasn't enough, the editors [also] had to promote unions Sept. 4 ("Retirees swell union presence," news article). Unions are a collective, making them socialist by their nature. Their purpose is to restrict the labor supply to drive up total compensation (wages plus benefits) for their members so they can afford to pay their dues (another tax). Typically, they drive total compensation so high it exceeds the economic value of the labor, which kills the company. Unions killed the U.S. steel industry, and they are killing the U.S. automobile and airline industries. The worst unions are in government-operated entities like Amtrak and the schools, which require huge infusions of tax dollars to remain operating while providing inferior service.

Finally, with all due respect to [Eldred Prince], the chairman of the History Department at Coastal Carolina University, he misses the nature of unions when he says "our unions are very moderate compared with European countries where many members are communists."

Unions here are just like unions there, full of socialists. South Carolina is only one of 22 states where the individual has the right to work without being forced to join a union. It will be a fight to keep it that way.

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