Monday, June 15, 2009
We need real health care reform at the national level
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We need real health care reform at the national level
I appreciated Sarah Bruyn Jones's article "The price of health care" (June 8) and am glad you are giving this issue the front-page coverage it deserves. With increasing unemployment causing more Virginians to become uninsured, the health care crisis is getting worse.
I see firsthand members of my family and community struggling to afford health care. I have also seen the long-term physical effects of several family members' inability to afford a minimal amount of health care. Just access to early screening could have saved so much. Our health care system is broken.
As the article points out, our Virginia legislators are trying to address the crisis by using stimulus funds to expand COBRA. I commend them for their efforts; however, there is only so much we can do at the state level.
Instead of burdening our state with figuring out ways to subsidize outrageous COBRA premiums or expanding free clinics, let's fix the system at the national level. Sen. Mark Warner will be making a huge decision on health care in the coming weeks. We need to tell him to support real health care reform that includes a public plan option.
Board Member Virginia Organizing Project
Teachers, drivers deserved better
Re: "Raises are given to 10 school administrators," June 4 news story:
It is outrageous that Roanoke Superintendent Rita Bishop and the city school board want to give pay raises in the amount of 4 to 32 percent. Nobody deserves a 32 percent pay raise. I wonder, is this only for administrators? Our teachers and bus drivers deserve raises more.
School superintendent and board members should be elected positions so they can be regulated by the taxpayers of Roanoke. Did someone sleep in class while Roanoke City Council struggled to balance the budget? Schools were closed and our teachers and bus drivers suffered.
Our teachers and bus drivers deserve far better than what they were forced to endure. Bus drivers were degraded and treated like second-rate citizens. We should purchase Bishop a one-way bus ticket back to Pennsylvania. Or could it be they don't want her there either?
Obama is making joblessness worse
President Obama has been telling the same lie since last November, when his plan to create jobs was carefully morphed into a plan to save or create jobs.
That small change has given Obama the ability to claim that his programs are working even when they are failing.
Unemployment is worse than Obama even projected.
In January, Obama announced his big-spending stimulus would save or create at least 3 million jobs by the end of 2010. Obama justified this by saying his spending plan would cause unemployment to be lower than what economists were projecting.
But the opposite has happened. Unemployment soared to 9.4 percent in May and hundreds of thousands more jobs have been lost than had been projected pre-stimulus.
Yet Obama still claims to have saved 150,000 jobs. Using Obama's own warped logic, there is a better case to be made that Obama has destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, since the economy is worse than what was expected. The man is either incompetent or is intentionally bringing the U.S. to its knees to worship at the altar of world government. Liberty and prosperity are dying out here.
Abortion must remain legal and safe
History tells us that when legal, safe abortions are not available, women seek help from butchers and dirty doctors in secret back rooms. The horror of using a wire clothes hanger to terminate a pregnancy shows us how desperate women can be.
It is the oath of the medical profession to save lives, and that is of people who are legally counted as living human beings. Regardless of your opinion and religious belief, an embryo may be alive, as are micro-organisms and amoebas, but they are not legally human beings.
No one likes abortion, but it should be kept legal as an option.
Instead of spending so much time and money on making women feel guilty and trying to reverse Roe v. Wade, why not spend that effort helping women help themselves? History tells us that when there are good social programs directed toward helping women and families, the number of abortions go down. After all, that is the goal, isn't it?
Reversing Roe v. Wade would not better anyone, only satisfy some narrow-minded people.
Funny how that happens.
