How Congress should lower health care costs
The most frustrating part of the health care bill is that nobody ever debated how the bill would lower health costs. Therefore, I as a health care consumer will offer what the Congress could have done to lower our health care bills:
» Increase the supply of qualified doctors. Start a medical and dental academy similar to the military academies that the United States has now with the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Qualified students would apply to medical school and earn degrees as general practitioners.
» Use modern computer and database technology to lower administrative costs by setting up a centralized database of medical records, and standardize the codes so that doctors and hospitals do not have to maintain a large staff to get paid by the insurance companies.
Until we look for solutions like the ideas I listed above, our health care system will continue to be the most expensive and fail to serve the needs of the people who are being forced to pay more for less service.
Danny Simenauer
Silver Spring
California green dreaming
Re: “Big Green Special Reports,” Oct. 1
The Examiner should be commended for its series of special reports and extended efforts to expose the Big Green movement that is bent on strangling our economy with extreme propaganda, environmental laws, fees and regulations.
Taken together, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s green dream for California — which is still the same old radical California agenda — is the same old toxic formula for economic suicide, slowly being carried out by the blind ambition of extreme environmentalists and over-reaching government.
Indeed, as if it wasn’t bad enough that former Gov. Gray Davis threw Californians under the bus with the 2000 energy crisis and tax increases, Gov. Schwarzenegger has added insult to injury with AB32 global warming legislation and more tax increases that will throw us over the economic cliff from which we have been teetering since the economy crashed. Even if Proposition 23 passes, effectively repealing AB32, SB722 is poised to bring it back in another form.
Surely, Arnold betrayed those who elected and re-elected him, yet he still lives in celebrity and political fantasy-land, without financial worry, dreaming about his next job as green energy czar for the Obama administration. Alas, nothing will change in California or the nation until indoctrinated and deceived liberal voters feel enough economic pain to discover where it really came from.
Certainly, there is little or no relief to hope for if either Meg Whitman or Jerry Brown is elected governor, and the liberal status quo remains in the Sacramento legislature.
Daniel B. Jeffs
Apple Valley, Calif.
