Health Insurance

* Regarding the Clinton health plan: While I did not vote for Bill Clinton, I really must give credit to both Clintons for bringing the issue of health insurance to a national discussion. I worked full-time for years for small businesses that could not afford health insurance for their employees. I became ill and a very serious heart condition was misdiagnosed for over a year while I was going to small neighborhood clinics that lack the equipment and wherewithal to diagnose certain problems. By the time the problem was properly diagnosed it was serious enough to warrant evaluation for heart transplant at UCLA. With even minimal health coverage, I’m sure I would have been able to afford to seek the proper medical treatment much earlier, perhaps avoiding further problems.

If it were left to people like George Bush, Bob Dole and many other senators and congressmen who have never had to worry a day in their life about how they could afford to see a doctor, the health care issue would not even be an issue.

GARY ADAMS

Summerland

* The article on Medicare claim rejections in Southern California (March 29) is a textbook case of how the media manipulate information for their own purposes.

Paragraph 6 quotes Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) as saying that the variation in benefits “raises doubts about the (government’s ability) to deliver a national package of health benefits as proposed by President Clinton.” Yet Paragraph 3 clearly states that the program is “a crazy quilt of separate and dramatically different programs run by 34 private insurance companies.”

I wonder how many Medicare recipients are aware that their programs are being administered not by the federal government--but by private insurance companies.

The article would seem to be a clear call for more, rather than less government control. No plan will be perfect, and government may be clumsy, self-perpetuating and inefficient. But at least it is not in business to make a profit.

DAVID BOWEN

Monrovia

* Isn’t it ironic (“High-Tech Care Puts Insurers in a Quandary,” March 28): I can now be rated as uninsurable for disease risk factors I cannot control--my genetics--while my overweight, couch-potato neighbor, who drinks a 12-pack of beer a day and smokes four packs a day, while eating his 50%-fat-content, salt-loaded diet is not excluded for disease risk factors he can control!

And this is a health care system that isn’t in crisis?

KATHRYN J. STEWART MD

Garden Grove