Letters to the editor 9-3

We need a public health care option in this country

Some people think that we have choices with private insurance. Here are the choices: If you are rich or work for a great company, you have great insurance. If you are middle class and unemployed like me, a healthy 59-year-old woman, you spend $371 a month for a plan with a huge deductible. If you are poor, you probably have nothing. Great choices.

I wish my dad could have had end-of-life counseling. After he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had spread to his bones, his doctor told him that he had two years to live. My father asked if he should get his affairs in order. The doctor told him no. My father was soon too sick to handle anything, and was dead in four months. He left a mess.

I have a friend who works for a company that is changing hands. She had cancer last year. You can't imagine how frightened she is.

So, for all you nay-sayers about a public plan, that is the real world.

Susan Richards

Minden

What's wrong with affordable health care?

Letter after letter has been published in the Nevada Appeal that might have been taken off a right-wing Web site template, attacking Sen. Harry Reid and President Obama.

I am so sick of having my Constitution and my God co-opted by mean-minded, blind-to-fact cretins and having their ignorant, hateful ranting touted as something legitimate.

Don't read the ludicrous conspiracist spin; read the bill or shut up.

We are the only First World country without a national health care plan. We are the only nation declaring itself proudly as Christian, which allows poor children to suffer and die without appropriate medical care, and families to slide into poverty over the cost of simple medical procedures, and allows elderly people to die, suffering in urine-soaked sheets in privately run, inadequately staffed facilities.

Do you like your 40-hour work week? Do you like unemployment benefits, Social Security and Medicare benefits, access to the Veteran's Administration if you are a veteran, workplaces made safe, fire departments, police departments, public libraries, public schools?

What is so evil about any of these institutions that get you people so crazed about expanding medical care? Don't you want to live longer, with better wages because your employer isn't sweating over insurance costs, and affordable treatment for the inevitable pains and diseases of aging?

What planet are you from?

Leigh McGuire

Stagecoach

Government spending us into oblivion

What is happening to our beloved United States of America? I am very distressed to see our great country going down the tubes by way of the Obama/Democrat/liberal Congress. What is happening? Where is the outrage that this cannot and should not be happening to us?

Cash for clunkers, cash for appliances, bailouts, buyouts, stimulus money, printing money to fund trillions of dollars of debt, government-run health care, more and more government intervention and expansion and higher taxes to finance these government programs (aka government take-overs).

You name it, big government is all over the place at the expense of the private sector, capitalism and the free market economy - everything that has made our country great, prosperous and the envy of every other country.

And, at what price to us, the citizens of the United States of America? Bigger government, higher taxes, more government intervention, a nation saddled with enormous future-generation deficits, decreased personal freedoms and substantially less individual responsibility.

Speak up now - shout now - while we still have a voice.

Vicki Hargrove

Gardnerville

Seniors, not Congress, need cost of living raise

Now that it's official that Social Security beneficiaries will not receive a cost of living adjustment for the next two years, do you suppose that Congress will also forgo their annual COLA raise which they so generously vote for themselves every year? I wouldn't take bets on it, would you?

It's kind of like the so-called health reform plan - good enough for the masses but certainly not good enough for the elite members of Congress. I imagine they will find a way to justify (in their collective minds) giving themselves their annual raise. It will be interesting to see.

For those seniors who rely solely on Social Security, I don't see how they are going to make it. Food prices, utilities, medicines are all going up. Other seniors have seen their retirement savings go down the tube. Going back to work is not an option for many due to health problems even if there were jobs available. I find this all very sad, especially for a generation that gave so much to this country.

Marilyn Sturges

Carson City