There are better ways to enact health care reform

To the Editor:

I have read with interest, the recent letters sent in support of President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. While I am as eager as anyone to see health care reform, it’s impossible for me to see this bill as anything but a disaster.

One writer seemed to revel at the prospect of “free health care.” Unless everyone in the health care field suddenly consented to work on a voluntary basis, there can be no free health care.

Government is but a collector and disburser of money. It can’t give something to someone without, first, taking it from someone else.

Another writer cited discrimination as the reason for laws allowing for insurance companies to charge up to 50 percent more for a young woman, than a young man. Actually, this is based on demographics, not discrimination. Women in the prime child-bearing years tend to generate much higher medical claims than do males of the same age group.

While I sympathize with young people who are trying to buy a home, pay for their education, etc., having someone else subsidize another person’s health care is not an acceptable solution.

I, also, have done my research, and it tells me that this program plans to cut $400 billion dollars from Medicare over 10 years. Part of this is reducing the rate of reimbursement to doctors for Medicare patients.

The numbers that I have seen indicate that doctors are reimbursed at a 70 to 80 percent rate for Medicare patients now. Cutting this rate to, perhaps, 50 percent, hardly seems like a viable option.

An $80 billion tax on providers of heath care equipment and a $100 billion tax on insurance companies that, supposedly, will be absorbed by these companies due to the increased volume of business that this bill provides is fantasy, and will lead to much higher premiums for health insurance.

Tort reform, corporate tax structures that would help companies provide health insurance, penalties for large companies that employ large percentages of part time people to avoid paying benefits, enforcing immigration laws so American taxpayers don’t have the burden of paying for free health care for illegals, and personal responsibility for paying for a significant portion of one’s own health insurance would be a much better place to start with health care reform.

Two proposed amendments to this bill that would have required proof of citizenship were both rejected. There is much more to this bill than health care reform.

Democrats are attempting to build their constituency by providing taxpayer subsidized health care. By providing 20 million illegal immigrants a “pathway to citizenship” (aka, amnesty) and offering them taxpayer subsidized health insurance is vote buying.

The latest Gallup poll indicates that more people are opposed to President Obama’s health care strategy than are in support of it. Maybe people are reading the fine print in this thousand page document and are, finally, seeing it for what it is: a big welfare program!

Melvin Schriver

Midland