EDITOR:
While health care reform is a hot button issue these days, it's difficult to discuss specifics because there really is no single plan yet. Most agree that some reforms to the current systems are needed. But I'm not sure that turning them over to the government is either wise or feasible. Do we really want a government agency in between us and our doctors?
Do we really believe that the government, no matter how well intentioned, can do it better than the private sector? I'm hard pressed to think of many things that any government agency does efficiently; collecting taxes and fighting wars perhaps, and I'm not so sure about fighting wars any longer. (I'm sorry - I did put government and efficiency in the same sentence didn't I?).
Medicare and Social Security may soon be broke, the U.S. Postal Service is running a $1 billion a year deficit, automobile dealers are not getting their checks for the "Cash for Clunkers" program. Should we really turn our health care delivery over to the same management? What will happen when the doctors don't get their checks? What will happen to those on Medicare when the funding is reduced by 10 percent as is planned?
There is much good about Medicare, Medicaid, the Veteran's Administration, and private health care. Perhaps we should be fixing the 15 percent of those systems that are broken, not throwing out the 85 percent that works well.
The people at town hall meetings are shouting because that's what people do when they feel that they aren't being heard. Recent polls indicate that the majority of our citizens do not want a government run health care delivery system. The anger seems to be not only about health care reform, but about unprecedented control over private enterprise, and increasing intrusion into our lives, by a government that we really don't trust. Some of our representatives appear to be either tone deaf, arrogant, or both.
Our government is spending money like a drunken sailor. Worse, they are spending money that they don't have - writing checks that they can't cash. Perhaps a better way would be to figure out how to make the existing systems solvent, and to concentrate on tort reform and waste, fraud and abuse, rather then creating a multi-trillion dollar government bureaucracy that will create nothing, produce nothing, and consume wealth.
But it's probably just my early stage dementia talking - along with a dash of paranoia.
Gary Griffith
Gardnerville
