Here I am just hanging up from a Republican National Committee fundraiser call. I explained to the nice 27-seven-year-old that I have seen too much swill from the fat-cat-friendly tea baggers or the sue-happy liberals that I just don’t think either have anyone’s best interest at heart but their own.
This includes letter-writer Mr. Ferguson, with whom I respectfully disagree. The two fastest-growing segments of the economy for the last two decades are the two most subsidized: education and health care. Costs are through the roof!
Why is it not unusual for a student to owe $100,000-plus in student loans or a UC system a whopping $32,000 a year only to end up working for nearly 20-percent less than what college grads made 10 years ago?
Why are Medicare patients racking up half-a-million-dollar medical bills? This is probably twice their lifetime contributions. If this continues, it’s not unsustainable.
And blaming it all on the 3 or 4 percent of the population who are illegal immigrants or the 8 percent of the work force that is lucky enough to belong to a labor union is absurd.
Heaven forbid someone actually makes enough money to afford their own health insurance or education!
In the U.S. we don’t let people get sick and die on the street. We have safety nets like Medi-Cal through organizations like IEHP that provide insurance for the underemployed for a few dollars a month. Or EBT (a.k.a. foodstamps) for the hungry or Medicaid for the indigent elderly.
We have got to get free market competition in health care and shift away from third-party direct payers getting reamed by quota-limited AMA doctors and their hospitals.
The same with education. Treat financial aid like the old G.I.-bill approach, where you have “x” dollars to spend in your lifetime on education and you choose where. I’ll bet costs drop like a rock!
And the half-million-dollar-a-year chancellors and college presidents will have to retire or have their incomes reduced.
But the paradox of the Tea Party is that they don’t want to pay anyone a living wage above the poverty line. Yet, they don’t want to pay for the socialized safety net required by the underemployed, either.
Here in Hemet Unified School District, the median per capita income is $19,000 a year, or $34,000 per household, so deal in the reality where you wrote your letter Mr. Ferguson.
The right’s anti-working man policies are exacerbating the need for the very handouts the right chronically whines about!
Talk about sloppy agape!
Mike Reno
Pine Cove