‘Clarifying a Controversy’

Your editorial doesn’t resolve the problem. Middle-income American retirees have great concern over long-term health care, nursing home needs, and if healthy, senior housing at an affordable price. None of these are being addressed. That’s why there is “the rage” to which you refer in your opening sentence. We want to live out our senior years in dignity and self-worth. The alternative is a fear based on hard evidence when friends and neighbors are caught in catastrophic illness. In such circumstances, we dread the possibility of assets spent and relief available only as penniless dependents.

Taxing seniors on levels of tax returns fails to take into account all the factors that impact on middle America. It’s double taxation at work, too. Retirement incomes were gathered after prior taxation while working. And in most cases, these incomes are not tied to inflationary trends. That was why a cost-of-living index was tied to Social Security payments. And after being given, taken away by taxation on Social Security, and now on Medicare.

Older Americans support health care for the “37 million Americans who have no health insurance of any kind.” That this condition exists rests with Congress. Don’t blame our social needs for this failure.

I find whatever “controversy” that has been created comes from an unwillingness to grapple with reality. There can be resolution of the problem(s). Reduce waste. Cut budgets of a military-industrial complex whose appetite has no stomach for more humane aspirations. Or let’s learn to have lips that read, “taxes.”

HYMAN H. HAVES

Pacific Palisades