Writer: Health care a basic human right
Health care reform is more than just another piece of legislation. It is one of those great moments in our history when we as a people decide who we are as a nation and how we are going to live and work together.
Click to sendIt is no less of an important time than when this country decided that blacks were full citizens and not three-fifths of a person or that women should be given the right to vote. It is no less of a time than when we decided that older people should be able to retire and not face their last years in poverty or go without medical care, and that no one should be denied the right to vote by a poll tax or any other means.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How can that happen when millions of our citizens have no health insurance and 60 percent of all bankruptcies are caused by people who cannot pay huge medical bills? How can that happen when a person loses his or her job and medical insurance with it and lives in fear of a serious illness, which is more likely to happen when people are under stress from being out of work? Health care is a basic human right, especially in a country of our means.
Over the past nine years, we have spent well over a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan without blinking an eye. Today, those wars are costing us $9 billion to $10 billion a month. If we can spend that much money killing and maiming people, why can’t we spend half that over the next 10 years saving lives and giving more of our citizens the ability to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Not to do so is morally and ethically indefensible.
WALTER R. SMITH
Lynchburg
New direction needed
Oh, come on people, let’s be realistic and look at the facts. Are we really better off having “for profit” insurance companies decide our health fates and what doctors we may or may not see?
These same “for profit” insurance companies that, from our outrageously high premiums, first build marble palaces for themselves, then pay their CEOs obscene salaries and bonuses. Is it any wonder that perfectly legitimate claims are being denied and that necessary procedures are being nixed?
Do we want to continue on a path where more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies in this country are health-expense related?
Sure, some of the proposed changes may not be the perfect answers, this bill is definitely a work in progress, but would it really be any worse for most of us than our current system?
LYA HALE
Lynchburg
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement