Letters.

• Position: Letter to the Editor

In March we invited readers to participate in an Open Forum concerning the health-care debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik ("Canada v. US," March 2000.) We received man), thoughtful responses--more than we can print here. The following is a selection of those letters. More can be found on our Website at:

www.washingtonmonthly.com/forum/index.html

Sick Men

Not since Newt Gingrich claimed women get monthly "infections" have I read anything as ignorantly sexist as Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that women "need" to see a doctor three times a month.

Absent pregnancy or chronic illness, there is no reason for a healthy adult woman to see a doctor even three times a year, much less three times a month. Meanwhile, my 40-ish male contemporaries are in and out of doctor's offices weekly, mostly for prescriptions: If it's not Rogaine for their bald spot and Viagra for their bedroom, it's Celebrex for the bursitis in their golf-swing arm, Claritin for their hay fever, or Lipitor to cut their cholesterol without having to exercise.

Not once in my working life have I used in health care anything remotely close to the amount I paid for health "insurance" Not the year I needed an MRI; not the year I ended up in the emergency room.

So-called health insurance in the U.S. is nothing more nor less than a protection racket that puts the Mob to shame. If you have it, you won't get run over by a truck. If you don't have it, you'll get run over by a truck.

Getting run over by a truck, of course, is one of the few excuses for needing health care that HMOs will accept.

LISA AUG Frankfort, Ky.

Mixing It Up

Your excellent health-care debate (March) was fascinating. Gladwell and Gopnik both made odd mixes of cogent and specious arguments.

Yet, out of it all, came this recurring and alarming claim by Gladwell: "[M]en don't need health care until they're middle-aged" Similarly, "I don't know that young men need health insurance."

Amazing; appalling! And then his well-to-do man's advice to women: If their health insurance fails them, they bought the wrong insurance. Just buy a more costly policy!

With those kinds of arguments, I found myself landing firmly on Adam Gopnik's side. No contest.

TOM ABLES San Diego, Calif.

No Free Lunch

Adam Gopnik describes the birth of his wife's sister's "very premature baby."

"The one thing they [the parents] never thought about, the one thing they never considered, the one thing they never had to pay attention to was: How much will this cost?" (Emphasis mine.)

"That," concludes Gopnik, "seems to me, in itself, the most powerful argument you can make for socialized medicine, to put it in the bluntest possible terms."

Who did pay for the child's birth? Somebody had to pay for it, sir, there's no such thing as a free lunch. So we have to assume that...