Readers Write (Oct. 31): Halloween, health insurance, sexual-assault coverage, political coverage

I am appalled at the publishing of "Where to find a haul on Halloween" (Oct. 20), which essentially advocated trick-or-treaters traveling to more bountiful neighborhoods. The beauty of Halloween is in its being a neighborhood event (one's own neighborhood), with trick-or-treaters often knowing their neighbors or getting to know them. I also think the real joy of Halloween is for the younger children who love to dress up and who are not apt to be traveling to other neighborhoods, though even respectful teenagers who get in the spirit of the holiday by wearing costumes are welcome at my door. The thought of packs of teenagers targeting specific neighborhoods feels uncomfortable to me. This is not apt to happen in my small neighborhood, since our city consists of only three blocks and has only one entrance, which is partly blocked by our volunteer fire department's fire engine and monitored by volunteers on the evening of Halloween in the spirit of keeping Halloween a safe neighborhood event.

I suspect that when the Star Tribune decided to publish the article, it did not take into consideration the potential consequences of advocating the targeting of certain neighborhoods as places to get the biggest haul. I hope that in the future, editors will consider both the positive and the negative repercussions their articles might have.

While the individual health plan premium rebates proposed by Gov. Mark Dayton (front page, Oct. 28) will certainly help those who do not qualify for subsidies, they really do not get at the underlying problem in the insurance system. My spouse and I are recently retired and are participating in the individual market for the first time in 2016. Frankly, the premiums we are seeing for 2017 are still within our budget expectations. What is jarring, however, is experiencing how unstable the individual insurance market is, with insurers dropping out, reducing coverage and capping enrollments.

It would be reassuring to hear the governor and lawmakers acknowledge that the problem lies with the way the Affordable Care Act attempts to shoehorn the individual mandate for coverage into the existing model of employer-provided insurance. This is particularly hard when employer-provided insurance remains tax-advantaged relative to individually purchased insurance. The result is that few people have any incentive to adopt individual insurance either at the employer or the employee level, making for a truly odd mix of individuals and families outside the employer system.

Individually based insurance is more sensible and safe than employer-provided insurance. It covers people through job changes, self-employment and job loss caused by illness. The safeguard put in place in the ACA against being rejected based on health history, combined with the individual mandate, should allow for a stable individual insurance market. It is time to do away with the (frankly unfair) double-deductibility of employer-paid insurance premiums. Employers should not be allowed a tax deduction for insurance premiums, while employees are allowed to exclude the amount from income. If this distortion were eliminated, more working people might opt to take their income in cash and buy their own insurance, enlarging and stabilizing the individual market.

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Allison O'Toole, the head of MNsure, did a good job explaining the improvements brought about by her organization ("MNsure is the way to go to find affordable insurance, tax credits," Oct. 27). It is true that recent spectacular price increases affect a small proportion of MNsure subscribers. It is also true, however, that health care takes a disproportionate and growing share of our gross state product.

Our health-access system assumes private health insurance financing. Even public programs now are outsourced. That system is crumbling. As it crumbles, it demands ever-increasing funding. While state subsidies of individual premiums provide temporary relief, we are sacrificing tax dollars that could be going to education, roads and other dire needs. We are not fixing the health financing problem; we are just feeding the beast.

Expert analysis of American health care financing usually describes it as fragmented and inefficient. That is, our insured population is split among many insurance pools, each with duplicative bureaucracy and often contradictory rules. Just ask the administrative assistant(s) in your doctor's office.

Few of these fragmented pools have negotiating power to sufficiently drive down prices nor facilitate industry-wide standards, such as for electronic medical records.

The lesson is that we need to join the rest of the developed western world by instituting a national, universal health care system that automatically includes all of us. The Medicare system is an example of such a system. So is Sen. John Marty's Minnesota Health Plan (mnhealthplan.org).

In reading about Alec Cook, an Edina High School graduate who is charged with sexually assaulting four women including assault with "force, strangulation, and suffocation" and who has "multiple other complaints about him," I reached the end of the article only to read that he "played rugby at school" and wished to become an astronaut ("Edina grad faces rape charges in Wis.," Oct. 26). To be honest, I could care less that this man, who has possibly violently sexually assaulted numerous women, played rugby and wished to become an astronaut.

I would think that if Cook is found guilty of even a fraction of the crimes leveled against him, he was too busy to have any time for playing rugby or planning for a career as an astronaut. Let's not sugarcoat the image of people like this, please!

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I have seen two articles on criminal charges against Cook. Each headline began "Edina grad ... ." Do all articles about area people charged with crimes identify them by where they went to high school? Or is it that "Edina grad" is shorter than "Twin Cities man," etc.? In that case, schools such as Anoka High School would seem to be at risk, but schools such as Cretin-Derham Hall High School would not. Or is it just that it is Edina?

A Star Tribune reporter went to the same rally as I did ("Libertarian Gary Johnson draws enthusiastic crowd in Shakopee," Oct. 28). She heard "pro-Uber, antiwar, pro-marijuana, anti-surveillance." I heard about lower costs of doing business, judicious use of our military, less overcrowding of our jails for petty drug offences, more respect for our neighbors of color, lower cost of government, safer streets, and respect for privacy of our citizens.