If Santa were in charge, we all would have coal
Editor, The Times:
As a physician, I recognize the great importance of health care to people — my career has been devoted to providing the best possible care at the lowest possible price. But even though health-care reform is badly needed, it is not an emergency requiring overnight, radical changes that threaten to do more harm than good [“Now’s not the time for health-care reform,” Opinion, editorial, Dec. 23].
Thus, I commend The Seattle Times editorial board for dropping support of the health-care-reform bills currently being rammed through Congress [“Put health care aside and fix the economy,” Opinion, editorial, Dec. 20].
At the moment, the real national emergency is the economy, and I agree with the editorial that Congress needs to focus on the economy and set health care aside.
Congress should focus on revitalizing the economy and creating jobs, by controlling its insatiable urge to spend our hard-earned money, lowering tax rates, and paying off a national debt that is ruining our credit even with Santa Claus.
Once we are on stable financial footing, Congress will be better positioned to revisit health-care reform. Its first priority then should be to overhaul Medicare and Medicaid, rather than restructuring the entire system.
If Congress passes this ill-conceived, massively expensive health-care bill, it will become the Grinch who stole Christmas.
— Arthur Coday, MD, Shoreline
Sen. Patty Murray must have added wrong
The editorial on Dec. 23 is right on — now is not the time for health-care reform. Certainly not reform that will add trillions to the deficit in these hard times of double-digit unemployment.
The editorial points out that much of the supposed payment for the Senate bill will come from cuts in the Medicare program.
In Sen. Patty Murray’s guest commentary “Delay won’t cure nation’s troubled health-care system” [Opinion, Dec. 23] responding to an earlier editorial “Put health care aside and fix the economy,” she stated that “Medicare will go bankrupt by 2017.”
Did she read the bill before voting? If she read the bill, she didn’t do the math. How can a program be funded from a source going bankrupt?
Murray cited the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate that the deficit will be reduced by $132 billion, but she does not mention that CBO is instructed to assume that the funding from cuts in Medicare will be real, not imaginary.
Both the House and Senate bills will drive up the cost of health care and, at 2,000 plus pages, become an expensive bureaucratic morass too complicated to administer.
— Edward Wittmann, Seattle
Senator right on; Seattle Times dead wrong
Sen. Patty Murray is right in her call to action on health-care reform. The Seattle Times editorial board’s call for delay is dead wrong.
More delay — more American deaths.
The current health-care system rates an F. The Senate version of health-care reform rates a C+. Murray understands that a C+ is better than an F. It is easier to move from a C+ to a B or an A, than from an F to a B or an A.
Action, not delay, on health care will begin solving one of the many problems facing our country. Congress can then take action to solve the other problems facing our country.
— Tom Megow, Renton
Sure, it’s not a perfect bill, but
I couldn’t disagree with The Seattle Times more on the editorial “Now’s not the time for health-care reform.”
If not now, when?
Sure, it’s not a perfect bill, but when have we ever had a perfect law? If the Founding Fathers had waited for perfection, we would have never become a nation in the first place. Surely, the compromise over slavery was unconscionable, but without it the U.S. would not exist.
Health-care reform is long overdue. We don’t need more delays and more people dying or going bankrupt needlessly. We are stuck with the current political sausage machine for now.
The Democrats have done the best they can do at this point with nothing but roadblocks from Republicans. We have to strive for a more perfect union, not sit around and wait for perfection.
There’s a recession going on after all.
— Paul S. McDevitt, Seattle
Political fender bender
The U.S. Senate faces the choice between a train wreck and a fender bender.
Train wreck: If this bill passes, the American medical economy will be emasculated, the general economy will suffer, our descendants will be saddled with another out-of-control entitlement program cost, and Democrats will lose Congress in 2010.
Fender bender: If this bill fails, President Obama will lose a little political capital.
The choice hinges on one vote.
This may indeed be history, but it is also an example of corrupted partisan power of the highest degree.
— Jeffrey S. Howard, Redmond