Start overhaul by controlling costs
As the House and Senate continue to cram forward with the plan to overhaul our great nation's health-care system, I have three questions for our elected representatives:
1. Will the president, congress and their various staff be required to give up their generous health-care benefits (as noted by President Obama last evening, July 22) and take the same options that will be forced upon the rest of us?
2. Will all of you be required to pay the additional taxes that will be forced upon those taxpayers earning a million or more, or pay for taxes on your "job supplied" health-care benefits as your colleagues are talking of doing to the rest of us?
3 Will legislation allow illegals to be rewarded with yet one more benefit that they are not entitled to? As I see it, they make up half if not more of the 47 million uninsured that we keep hearing about.
If the answer to any of these questions is NO ... then what makes you think the rest of us deserve to be shoved into something less than adequate that will do no more than run up our already-out-of-control deficit? Why should the rest of the population be required to take rationing and spiraling costs if those people we elected to represent us are not required to take the same plans and suffer the same cost escalations?
I have no faith the government will reduce health-care spending, and see this as yet another boondoggle requirement that our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren will be forced to pay in the future.
I agree that something needs to be done to rein in the costs, but you are looking at the wrong people for that. The insurance industries, the trial lawyers associations, and particularly the pharmaceutical industries are the ones most directly responsible for the explosive inflation of health-care costs, coupled with the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Medicare and Medicaid systems.
Do something to control those costs and loosen the stranglehold these entities have on the business of health care and you might find that the uninsured are able to get their own affordable insurance without the help of the government.
Cindy Bandur
Island Lake