Health care bill should be a group effort

To the Editor:

I am writing in response to recent letters regarding the proposed health care bill and the cost. I read the letter from Pat Ashby from Oakland (“Proposed health care plan is already reducing our benefits,: Nov. 30 Times-News) and wanted to add my viewpoint.

While I agree with the letter writer that irresponsible government spending is dragging all of us down and we are reaching a point of critical mass if the predictions of a “jobless recovery” are accurate, I think it is in all our best interests to provide insurance to all citizens.

I support a bill to give everyone health insurance coverage. Our government currently provides health care free of charge to Americans who have no income.

It provides health care to people of a certain age who shouldn’t have to work any longer and can enjoy their retirement years. I don’t understand how we can say we shouldn’t do something for the people in our country who are working, paying taxes but don’t have the option to get insurance where they work and cannot afford to buy it on their own.

I have always believed that the people working every day, paying taxes and trying to provide for their families are the backbone of our great nation. Why are we providing assistance for other individuals and corporations and turning our backs on these folks who, while helping pay for the benefits of others, cannot get those same benefits for themselves.

The plant where I worked closed recently. The biggest worry for most people wasn’t as much paying their monthly bills, it was how would they provide medical care for their families.

Four hundred dollars a week in unemployment sounds like enough money to keep someone in their house and their heads above water. That’s until you take $600 a month out for COBRA payments so they can keep insurance.

After the closure, I began to look at universal health care in terms of my Christian faith. If we asked, “What would Jesus do?” I can’t imagine the answer would be anything other than we need to support a bill that cares for others, as Jesus called us to do. I recently found out the Methodist Church as an organization supports health care for all Americans, and being a member of the Methodist Church, I am compelled to join that support.

The problem is how to do it. It is in the hands of our elected officials, which gives me great pause.

As an American citizen, I expect our elected officials to sit down in bipartisan fashion, drawing on the best and the brightest folks out there to solve the problem of how best to craft this bill. Sadly, that is not the case.

The Democrats are trying to run a bill, any bill through just to get it done before the mid-term elections. Likewise the Republicans are dragging their feet in the hopes they can defeat the bill (which may not be a good bill to be sure) and position themselves politically for 2010.

Politicians of both parties have become way too concerned with re-election and power and not nearly concerned enough with doing the right thing.

I was with Pat Ashby all the way up to the last sentence. “Stop government wasteful spending” is an outstanding idea. “Leave our health benefits alone” only works if you have them, and unfortunately 40 million people in this country don’t.

We need to do this. We just need to be smart about it, and that will require cooperation between two groups that so far have shown no signs of doing that.

Mark Stickley

Moorefield, W.Va.