The Palm Beach Post
Letter to the Editor
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The writer of “Conyers’ universal care proposal is unmanageable,” (Sept. 8) Opinion, about the Conyers bill for universal health care is revealed as both unthinking and unfeeling.
He is the former because the bill in no way emulates Sweden’s health-care system nor could it in any way result in stunting our economic growth. He makes it sound as though huge new taxes would be required, whereas the contrary is true. Eliminating more than 1,000 insurance companies with their staffs of clerical workers, advertising and lobbying expenses, dividends to shareholders and large CEO compensation would save the system $400 billion. That is enough to cover every person in the United States. It doesn’t call for adopting a system based on Sweden’s but on simply expanding our own functioning Medicare. That system, initiated for those 65 and older 42 years ago, would now cover all.
As for the bureaucracy he warns about, nothing could possibly be worse than that now in effect, where non-medical insurance company employees make life-and-death, long-distance decisions denying procedures ordered by physicians or delaying care for long periods while searches are made for reasons to deny it.
I call the writer unfeeling because nowhere does he make any mention of the 47 million Americans with no insurance, of their sleepless nights worrying about what they’d do if faced with serious illness and of the more than 18,000 who die needlessly each year because they couldn’t get the care that could have saved them. The writer displays not one iota of concern of this worsening breakdown. He treats this issue as though naive legislators such as Rep. John Conyers, D- Mich., are promoting a foolish bit of do-goodism.
I, in supporting this desperately needed program, am accused by people like the writer, of being a bleeding heart. I infinitely prefer that to being heartless.
H. DAVID PRENSKY
Palm Beach