Letters

How to fix it

    With our nation’s health care system in crisis, I have not heard one word about how to really fix it.  I have heard about nationalization, forcing everyone to have insurance and making care providers cut their prices through government mandates.  However, none of these so called “solutions” addresses the real issue, the root cause of skyrocketing health care costs: Health Insurance.

    Just as 30-year mortgages artificially inflated the price of homes, health insurance has done the same to the price of health care.  Before mortgages—yes, there was a time when Fannie and Freddie did not exist—one had to save or inherit enough money—or borrow from rich Uncle Joe—before one could buy a house.  That kept the demand low and, thus the prices low.  Enter the 30-year mortgage.  The number of people who could immediately “afford” to buy a home soared.  Demand went up.  Prices went up.  The same is true for health insurance.  Now that “someone else” was paying the bill, people began using the system more.  While not always a bad thing, one can easily see how the system has been wildly abused.  Demand went up.  Prices went up.  The other problem with insurance is that it is essentially a pyramid scheme.  As with every pyramid, there comes a time when it becomes top-heavy and collapses under its own weight.

    Okay, the cause of the problem is straightforward enough.  What about a solution?  If the cause was the introduction of artificial demand by way of insurance, then the solution could not possibly be more insurance—government or private.  To get more people on insurance would be like adding more bricks to the pyramid.  You could prop it up for awhile, but in the end the inevitable collapse would be all the more catastrophic. 

    It took decades to cause this problem.  Unfortunately, it will take decades—and a lot of discomfort—to solve it.  We must systematically dismantle the health insurance industry as we know it.  By incrementally cutting back on health insurance (there, I said it) we can eventually—again over a period of decades—wean ourselves of our addiction to it.  This will happen as the market naturally, gradually—through the law of supply and demand—causes health care prices to go down.  This will in turn enable the vast majority of us to be able to afford health care without the need for insurance.

    I realize this is a very high level picture.  One could argue that it is way too simplistic. (Obviously, this solution would require a gargantuan effort to get it right.)  Besides, there are too many obstacles, and too much at stake, and quite simply, it is too painful to be realistic.  For example, what about all the money spent on research and development for disease cure and prevention?  And then there are the poor people who could never afford health care without some type of assistance. 

    Yes, there are many valid reasons to fear this approach.  On the other hand there is one big reason to fear what is currently being proposed: inevitable, catastrophic collapse of the entire system.

Mark Laperle

Bedford

America’s health care problems

    So you think nationalized health care with solve all of America’s health care problems.  Then ask you yourself this question; Can the same Federal government that has Social Security going broke, Medicare going broke and a Department of Defense known to buy $600 hammers and $1200 toilet seats, really run a complicated heath care system?

    What about senior citizens and those with cancer; both are long term and expensive to care for.  Do you actually think that they are going to get the newest and best treatments?  The fact is that they will not get the best, because the best is too expensive. 

    Nationalized heath care will become legalized genocide of the old and very sick.  Great Britain’s national heath care recently stopped providing life prolonging drugs for breast cancer victims because it was too expensive.  In short, if the Federal government does not want to pay for a lifesaving or life prolonging treatment, you die.

    Did you know that Congress and the President have exempted themselves from any national health care program?  They get to keep their top of the line health insurance, but you will not have what they have.

    National health care sounds great, but is it?

Eric D. Thompson

Bedford

One of the

saddest places

    Recently, I visited the Bedford County “Animal Shelter,” or pound, and I took treats for some of the innocent beings imprisoned there.

    When I walked in, a two-legged gal probably in her late 30s to early 40s was in there bawling and distraught, with tears running down her face. I passed, but not wishing to interfere, I went on in. As I was giving a treat to another doggie, one of her young daughters, approximately 10 years old, came to me and said, ”This is our doggie up here. She has to be put to sleep.” I went up with her and looked and gave the little girl a treat to give her doggie.

    Then, her mama came, tears a pourin’ down. She said, voice trembling with tears, “She got a neighbor’s duck and is going to be put to sleep.”

    I responded, “every dog in the world is going to chase something. The fair thing is to replace the duck!” I gave her a better treat, which she handed to her dearly beloved four-legged family member – which she had for years, in her final gesture of love; her beloved pup's last supper and then turned and walked out and didn’t look back. As her tears continually poured from her reddened, down-trodden eyes, and ran like a hot, saddened, broken gusher down her anguished face.

    It reflected upon that, and also that a couple of years ago, a friend, one of our county’s supervisors, and I were discussing what has happened to our “society” during our life times, ... He said, “we have lost our innocence.”

    I stood there looking at that poor doggie and the others, then the kittens … romping and playing … innocent children in a cage with little hope of being able to experience love and thought of “suffer the little children to come unto me” to learn love. Going further, I thought, “we have a society which  doesn’t allow a 2-legged child to be a kid and pushes computer junk and plastic things, the products of materialism, upon them and takes away their innocence and throws that into a dangerous imitation of life.”

     We have a society which oft throws their wise elders into a nursing home when they have become again innocent beings, as they were as a child. And, it is done so because it is innocent and they are no longer productive in this society based on materialism, on imitation things. And, we have a society that condemns to death an innocent 4-legged creature for being its natural “self” and chasing and playing.

    Our society, in our quest for materialism, our guidance of superficiality and need to control everything so that our “make-up looks right,” has lost any sense of ethics and what a natural inner “self” should be, and in so doing, our society has not only lost its innocence it has fully betrayed its innocence.

    It may be too late to save that innocent doggie, and possibly in a few years her 2-legged mama’s tears will end and her broken heart will heal, but what lives in the future for a society that neither knows nor cares about where innocence lives.

    The true knowledge/understanding of love will be a thing of rarity in such a society and without that, what does it say for our humanity? “Make-up” controls cannot always make the cracks in the character of a society or of an individual.

    While we’re at it, let’s put to death that cat because it caught a bird or that owl because it caught that kitten or that kitten because it caught that grasshopper … stupid humans, empty society!

Samuel Edmund Coffey

Bedford

Bulletin Bias and Rick Howell’s  false title

    Recently S.H. Parsons from Forest wrote an editorial to the paper concerning “Follow your own Instructions” concerning the  way editorials are “edited” in the Bedford Bulletin.

    I completely agree that the editor of this paper needs to follow their own advice. As I have wrote before, private citizens (customers) are allowed one (1) editorial a month, and you have Rick Howell who is listed as a “correspondent” spewing misinformation and lies weekly, and uses this just for a platform for his far left views that he tries to submit as the truth, but is the opposite. ... I wrote an article three or four times a while back about a local company here in Bedford and told the truth off how corrupted the management was there and how they discriminate against employees, and are in positions not due to skills but shady dealings and favoritism,  but it was not printed because the “Editor” said “As a rule, we do not print letters that take issue with private companies.”

    It would almost make you think he is buddies with the so-called “manager “ of that company  since there are “publicity” articles written  and the same as Rick Howell, or it’s the “Bedford Click” ideology. But Rick Howell was allowed to slander Liberty University in the June 3 edition , and others by saying that “It may seem insulting to say so, but it’s true that a degree from Liberty is not worth much outside of Lynchburg Virginia.” What’s the difference?

    Anyone knows that this is not true at all and I challenge the editor of this paper to remove the “fake” title of “correspondent” that he uses for a soapbox of far left lies to have a place to voice it weekly. Free speech is  available for all, and he should only be allowed to write an editorial monthly like the rest of us. Why? Because he is a left wing political activist, not a “writer or journalist” who uses this paper as a platform to spew his scalawag left wing ignorance, and falsehood.

    ... I noticed from my last article concerning him that I said he listed himself as an “educator” in the school system in Roanoke, which he quickly removed from his “blog” of Liberal mess he spews on the Web especially when I “promised” to expose him to parents of students revealing his Anti-Christian and Bible thrashing, Gideon hating bunch the Americans United  for Separation of Church and State loons which have scared teachers who have no backbone into thinking that kids can’t draw Nativity scenes in Art Class at Christmas time, or say a prayer either. I know first hand of children telling me that if you pray in school “they will send you to the principal’s office,” which is wrong.

The phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution...

    How about bragging on Tom Perriello voting for Cap and Trade that will cost taxpayers?   I find it hard to trust a transplanted New York lawyer wearing $800 suits telling me he is going to help me. My suggestion: Term limits of no more than eight years for the House and Senate, and get some people up there wearing bib overalls, or a  few calluses on their hands voting on the spending who actually “read” the bills and see what improvements you will see.

    ... If Rick Howell is being “paid” for the Liberal column  at the Bulletin, he should be listed as an employee, which  we all know he is not ...

    I challenge the  editor of this paper to quit giving him a soapbox to spew  left wing lies, and be subject to the same editing and monthly allowance of one editorial per month just as we citizens are. He is definitely not a journalist and should not be given false titles to have a secured place to advertise his misconceptions and lies. ... Allow Howell  the monthly editorials like the rest of us, or list him as an employee.

David Hubbard

Bedford