Health Debate in Congress

I can’t believe that Bob Dole and the Republican Party so despise Bill Clinton and the Democrats, and are so wed to business, that they would deny health care to millions of desperate American families. I’m sure this is not what the people of Kansas had in mind when they sent Sen. Dole to Washington.

As Americans, we are being asked to pay for health-care insurance through taxes or higher prices on the things we buy. If we pay through taxes, the poor pay, let’s say, 2% of their income, and the wealthy can pay 2% of their income . . . or we can all pay more for the things we buy. On the other hand, we can go along the way we are, and hope for the good fairy. The Republican Party motto should be “Better fat dividends than healthy Americans.”

BLAKE H. FINCHAMP

Huntington Beach

* Does “NME to Settle Fraud Case by Paying Record $362-Million Fine” (June 29), regarding a Santa Monica-based hospital company, explain why a stay in the hospital has been so expensive? And does it explain why we, the people, who are the government, need to take the entire health industry away from the greedy profiteers?

CHARLES LANSDOWN

Bellflower

* Let me offer a simple solution to the health-care dilemma. Let’s start with what we can afford. We are already paying one of the highest rates in the world. Let’s assume that this is the absolute maximum that the government is going to spend and write that into the frontispiece of the law.

Next we can address how we are going to distribute that amount. If we want universal coverage, then the money for recipients not now covered must come out of the money being spent on present recipients. That means less for Medicare, Medicaid, etc. The government will simply have to cut back on the amounts that it presently allows for various procedures to keep the total spent below the mandatory cap. The recipients will have to pick up a bigger portion of their own medical bills. We will all share the pain of medical costs and we will all have an incentive to keep those costs down.

Above all, let’s have no new taxes. Let’s leave private insurance and employer plans as they are now. It will be up to each of us to do whatever is necessary to supplement the amount that the government can provide within its strictly limited budget.

H. RAY LAHR

Malibu

* Re “Health Care for Women Isn’t Negotiable,” Column Left, June 23:

Sen. Barbara Boxer wants abortion to be part of our “health-care” coverage. Many, many people in this country strongly believe that abortion is violent, repulsive, unconscionable and morally abominable. Isn’t it enough that we must live in a land that allows the murder of the unborn? Must politicians now slap us in the face by asking us to pay for it too?

Boxer’s main point seems to be that by not including abortion in the health-care plan, this will be opening a “Pandora’s box of possible discriminatory treatment.” She thinks that if abortion is not included, other groups will then lobby to exclude other health-care provisions such as coverage for contraception, AIDS or blood transfusions. I don’t know anyone opposed to these provisions. This is a ridiculous scare tactic. However, I do hear lots of people talking about not wanting to pay for other people’s abortions. If citizens must kill their own offspring, why can’t they pay for it themselves?

PHILIP JASPER

Westminster