Why aren’t they listening?
The Obama administration and socialistic progressive Democrats are trying to force a massive, costly health-care-reform bill upon the American people without the transparency that was promised [“Senate Dems appear ready to drop expanded Medicare,” News, Dec. 15].
How they plan to make cuts in costs while expanding coverage with an inefficient, money-draining bureaucracy remains to be seen. Why are they pressuring legislators to vote on bills and amendments they haven’t read and to some degree haven’t even seen?
Why has there been no discussion on portability of health insurance from state to state? What about some degree of tort reform?
Conservatives and moderates who brought these possibilities for discussion are being shut out. In the latest MSNBC poll, more than 75 percent of the American people are against Obama’s hasty and radical attempt to overhaul health care.
Why aren’t the progressives in Washington, D.C., listening?
— Laurie Hatakeda, Redmond
Kill this bill!
The current Senate health-care bill has become a travesty [“Cap-cost loophole cut in Senate bill,” News, Dec. 12].
It has been weakened to the point of becoming a gift to the insurance companies. It mandates that individuals must purchase health insurance from a private insurance company or be fined or jailed. Yet it provides nothing to control escalating insurance premiums — a public option.
Insurance companies must accept people with pre-existing conditions, but the insurance companies can set exorbitant premiums for these people. Insurance companies will be allowed to charge older people rates that are three times higher than for younger people.
This is not reform.
This is a gift on par with the Bush administration’s Medicare Part D gift to the pharmaceutical industry. The Senate bill is a guarantee of additional medical bankruptcies for millions of Americans.
Better no bill than one that preserves a dysfunctional health-care system and that transfers billions of taxpayer money to the insurance companies for outrageous executive salaries and bonuses, marketing expenses and shareholder dividends.
I am asking Sen. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to kill this bill rather than see a huge taxpayer bailout of the insurance industry.
— Kenneth J. Jones, Seattle
Freedom of religion and the Bill of Rights
The First Amendment and the nine proceeding amendments to the Constitution restrain only the government from impeding certain and specific rights of individuals [“First Amendment rights for all,” Opinion, Northwest Voices, Dec. 15]. The amendments do not necessarily restrain individuals from impeding the rights of other individuals.
Contained in the nine following amendments is an amendment citing “freedom of religion.” Catholic bishops are making a valiant attempt to circumvent this freedom through imposing their religious and institutional beliefs on the government and other individuals.
As they cloak their attempts in the garment of humanitarianism, they overstep the same bonds securing the very rights that allow them to exist, as they do, in the U.S.
If the Catholic bishops think they should have undue influence on government, they should be willing to give up their tax-exempt status, pay taxes on their wealth and register as a political-action group. Until such time as they cede their religious status for political status, they should channel their brand of humanitarianism to influence individuals, not government.
Again, this writer suggests a reading of the Bill of Rights when assuming their use to support specific actions and causes.
— Karen Clay, Port Orchard
An all-too-common misconception of conception
Pastor Frank Schuster, in his letter regarding the Catholic bishops’ position on abortion and health care [“First Amendment rights for all,” Opinion, Northwest Voices, Dec. 15], makes an all-too-common incorrect assumption that we all agree God places the soul in the child-to-be at the moment of conception —the point where the egg and sperm unite to create that first single-celled fertilized cell called the zygote.
I don’t agree with this assumption, nor do millions like me.
Dr. John Opitz, professor of pediatrics, genetics, obstetrics and gynecology, testified before President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics that some 40 percent of normal embryos are flushed out unnoticed in a woman’s normal menstrual flow; they are not miscarriages.
This fact plus several others raise serious questions about the belief that God places souls in eggs as they are being fertilized by sperm — the moment of conception.
What happens to all those souls up there in heaven who were never born, never had a thought, never had a brain? What about identical twins formed from a single fertilized egg with its one soul? Does each get half a soul?
My recommendation to all is that we do a little more thinking and a little less believing.
— Ralph Turman, Seattle