Guest Comment: Health plan isn’t change we want

I have seen letters to the editor of this and other papers stating individual desires to have a one payer system or some form of health care system which would be run by the United States government.

I ask myself, “Are these people smoking something or are they just not really thinking this out?”

They don’t seem to realize that the “Promised Land medical system” in reality doesn’t and won’t exist.

There is a problem already brought on by President Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare system.

It takes up a huge amount of our national budget and is and has been running in the red for along time.

The idea for Medicare came out of the same idea farm that produced Social Security.

Prior to Medicare passage a government health care plan was looked on as communism by some. Look at us now, eh?

In 1988 major changes to the system was implemented and included was the law that higher income seniors had to pay higher premiums and deductibles in order to pay for the expansion of the benefits.

Dan Rostenkowski, (congressman) was at one point chased to his car by a group of these angry seniors.

The next year that change was repealed by congress. Needless to say the higher income seniors had refused to pay the increase.

The people proposing this new health system say there are 47 million people who do not have health insurance in this country. (Only less than a year ago it was about 35 million, but has for the sake of convenience, I guess, gotten worse.)

They say all these people need to be covered by some form of insurance.

They don’t seem to want to realize that one-third of them are in this country illegally, one third are in some sort of transition and most likely will have individual insurance through new jobs etc. within months of their reporting and the final third are not able to get or pay for insurance for whatever reason.

Obama and others think that they need to get every one into a centrally controlled health system because that would be the caring thing to do (and besides it might keep them in office for a second term) or they can reduce the deficit that it is running by including the younger people who don’t cost as much for medical at this time.

If all pay into the system those who don’t use the system help pay for those who do. Sounds simple to fix, however that is a fallacy. It won’t cover the cost of all Americans by any means.

The CBO has even said this as well as a number of economists. So it looks like our government is willing to “double down” on a system that is broke in order to fix the deficit problem and in fact make the deficit much worse than it already is.

I guess this is in order for a president and Congress that show such lack of common sense in administering their fiduciary and economical responsibilities through all the deficit spending and passing bills that they haven’t even read!

Some of you voted for change and unfortunately it looks like we all may be included in this senseless act of political misfortune whether we want it or not.

Thanks a lot!

Good health to you too!

B.L. Jordan moved to Green Valley in 2002 from Denver where he and his wife owned a lumber yard for 16 years. He attended Milwaukee School of Engineering and Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he majored in business, and seved in the Navy. The views expressed are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of this newspaper.