Suddenly deficits matter

Suddenly deficits matter

EDITOR:

I have been reading much folderol about the efforts at health care reform, and the whoop–whoop journalism about the costs. Well, I do have a little question about the economics that nobody seen to be paying any attention to.

What costs more? One hundred to 200 prescription pills per year costing 25 dollars for each pill to alleviate a crippling migraine headache, with the person working and contributing to Social Security and Medicare, or total disability payments for a year?

I should add, That person and his co-workers have no benefits, such as a private insurance plan, or anything else.

These people, and tens of thousands like them, are not opinions or statistics. They are real people.

Then I watch our oh-so-wise congressmen working more to protect the profit margins and 30 percent overheads of the various private health care and insurance companies, to whose lobbyists they so fervently do their toadying. (Medicare’s overhead is 3 percent.) It is all too obvious that those Republicans and “Blue Dog” Democrats do not care about the people at all. Just those who contribute to their campaign funds. Persons like the one with the migraine are just dirt to them. They obviously think that Matthew 25.31-46 was added to the Bible by liberals within the last 30 years, and that it can be ignored. They also believe that it is OK to run up a deficit killing people in a war, but it is forbidden to care for the health and well being of the citizens of our country.

Speaking of deficits, the Obama deficit they, and you, whine, cry, and moan about is mostly, and firmly, rooted in the Bush administration. That from the massive off-the-books deficit resulting from the consequences of Bush’s childish search for cheap glory in Iraq, and his failure to do a proper follow up in Afghanistan so he could start that Iraq mess.

That, plus the SEC’s repeal of the rules specifying the maintenance of reserve funds and ceilings on the investment exposure. Yet those Wall Street parasites remain unpunished.

I am totally disgusted with the whole nauseating crew.

JEROME K. STEPHENS

Warren