To the Editor:
I suppose I was not surprised to read Pete Hope’s letter of Sept 17 (“More choice not less,” Page 4) especially after I read that 77 percent of Oklahoma students do not know who the first President of the US was. There is a lot of misinformation and disinformation promulgated in this country. Mr. Hope’s statement of the facts sounds rather like the echo of what he’s heard on television rather than any other kind of discussion.
Aside from fraud caused – not by patients – but by providers of health care and this only shows that more Government oversight is needed – Medicare is a lot more efficient then anything the insurance industry could accomplish, and guess what: Medicare’s a Single Payer System, and not at all socialist.
Mr. Hope states that he worked hard for his Medicare. We all did. There is nothing in health care reform proposals that would decrease what I (or you) currently receive. No one’s current health care would change. The difference in our perception (candidly) is that I don’t get my information from the FOX News channel.
Here is a fact: reforming the method by which health care is paid will fix the single cause of middle-class economic difficulties Here is another fact: 45,000 people died last year (more than by homicides or drunk driving) year because they did not have health care.
One of the issues that confounds me is when people say they don’t want a government bureaucrat making their health care decisions; who makes them now? An insurance company clerk decides, using such techniques such as canceling health care insurance for no reason other than a person gets sick or denying coverage because of “pre-existing conditions.”
Then, there is the issue of rights. Whose rights? Why gets to decide what people can and cannot do? Don’t they have a right to not exercise and or to smoke even knowing adverse affects? The Constitution also doesn’t cover those issues either, but this is not a Constitutional issue. It’s a moral issue: everyone deserves to be treated with human decency.
Patricia Manning, Damariscotta
