Medicare for all is the answer

I totally oppose mandatory requirements to purchase private health care insurance from private corporations, an unproductive act that ultimately serves only corporate shareholders. Private insurance does not reduce health care costs nor does it provide medical services to those without insurance: True reforms that are needed.

The current so-called “health care reforms” (as proposed by both major political parties) keep those unproductive private corporations firmly in place. It criminalizes those who do not wish to participate in the scheme. It would further impoverish seniors and others who cannot afford to shunt what remains of their discretionary income into insurance products that provide no useful service.

Give us true health care reform: Provide Medicare for all (single-payer, which is not single health care provider).

Janaia Donaldson

Nevada City

How about our socialized education, police and fire protection?

When questioned about single-payer financed health care at a town hall meeting, Obama first said it was the only way to cover everyone, and second he said, “if we were starting from scratch,” he would consider it. We already have a single-payer system called Medicare. It operates on 3 percent administrative costs versus the insurance companies that use 30 percent of what they collect for “administrative costs.”

Expanding Medicare for anyone who wants to buy into it would not be starting from scratch. No one I know who receives Medicare wants to give it up because it's “socialized medicine.” Anyone repelled by collecting taxes to fund socialized medicine must also be repelled by property taxes that fund socialized police and fire protection, as well as education.

Don't be fooled by insurance lobbyist sound bites. We need to eliminate the corporate bureaucrat that stands between us and our doctors and prevents us from getting the care we need.

Mindy Oberne

Grass Valley

Fascism in America? Look around

The health care reform political contest in D.C. is a bubble about to burst and it looks like the mega-corporations will once again emerge victorious. It is pretty safe to say that for convenience sake we frequently accept what we are told to believe. In this age of a corporate state intent upon the destruction of all vestiges of individuality by every means available, one proposal seems as good as any other and maybe we are not getting the complete picture.

No idea should be set in stone. If a majority of taxpaying American voters' request for Congress to go back and draft a better plan is denied, it should prove once and for all that America is no longer a democracy.

In his treatise on fascism, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini wrote the following: “...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the state alone. ...”

Fascism in America seems far-fetched until one reads the details of the “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010” proposed recently by our very own Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman and then it all takes shape as frightfully real.



Dan Whittman

Sacramento

General welfare of Americans is one goal of our Constitution

We cannot downplay the urgency of health care reform.

One goal of our Constitution — written into the preamble — is “to promote the general welfare.”

Yes, the general welfare!

In today's terms, this might include sharing our personal risks in a pool of many citizens.

When we mortgage our homes, we agree to carry homeowner's insurance. As drivers, we purchase car insurance or else lose our licenses if we can't cover expensive mishaps. To keep us healthy, productive, and debt free, then, shouldn't we all be able to insure ourselves against the risk of costly medical care?

What would my husband and I have done if we could not have “shared the risk” of three major medical setbacks through the luck of marvelous health insurance coverage? We were not singularly deserving — such “luck” should be there for everyone!

Today, when complex medical care spawns huge hospitals, costly equipment, and extensive staffing, massive health insurance corporations challenge the power of government itself.

We cannot ignore their vested interests, but if we let them call all the shots, who will speak for open access to health care and the physical welfare of all citizens?

Sherrill Brooks

Grass Valley