craigdailypress.com

To the editor:

The April 14 Daily Press article "Club 20 committee proposes health care reform" speaks of Club 20's "plan to reform the state's health care system." But medicine in Colorado is not a "state health care system." The intention of the Club 20 plan, and of the newly formed 208 Health Care Commission, is not to reform an alleged "system," but to create one. Any system involving mandatory, single-payer, state-sponsored, universal, or comprehensive expanded coverage means socialized medicine. The only way to enforce such terms is by the force of government. Socialized medicine causes rationing of services -- foreshadowed by the proposed "reasonable and necessary limitations." Socialized medicine has proven disastrous elsewhere -- Tennessee's (TennCare) and Canada's systems are infamous examples.

All such schemes are immoral, trampling the individual rights of everyone -- including the individual rights of doctors, insurers and patients! to voluntarily choose the terms on which they do business.

Mike Pramenko said "we already provide health care for everyone via the emergency room." The reason that emergency rooms are forced to treat everyone, as Mr. Pramenko pointed out, is because Congress passed a law forcing doctors and hospitals to treat anyone going to an emergency room, regardless of whether they can pay. In other words, it forces them to work for nothing. It is government interference that has created the problems we face in health insurance and health care. To create a "system" to "expand" this interference to everyone, will make these (and worse) problems "universal." The solution is to end such interference as quickly as possible. To do so, the 208 Commission must consider proposals other than a single-payer system.

The Web site www.WeStandFirm.org is an excellent source of information on the causes of the current condition of health insurance and health care, and on what you can do to promote freedom and individual rights in medicine.

Richard Watts

Hayden