Ordinary people should benefit

John Tanner, chief of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section, asserted that elderly minorities die at an earlier age than whites, with one of the reasons being a lack of health insurance. His inference was that these minorities can't be denied their voting privileges because they are dead.

Some right-wing pundits, earlier, had said that 2-year-old former heart patient and SCHIP beneficiary Bethany Wilkerson should have never been born because her parents had no health insurance.

I don't which is more egregious -- disenfranchising elderly minorities and begrudging a family the right to bear a child, or justifying both because of a lack of health insurance. Apparently these "conservatives" believe that the lack of health insurance is a fact of life, and the ramifications, death of a child or of an elderly person, are acceptable with government having no responsibility to either.

Our nation is in a hopeless place when our government exists only for the benefit of government officials and private contractors and not for the benefit of the American people.

Karen Wagner

Rolling Meadows