Letters

Times Argus In his letter “No thank you” (Times Argus, Sept. 6) Mr. Keith Zandy asks several questions of proponents of single-payer health care. One of these is: “When your health care decisions fall into the hands of a cold-hearted bureaucrat, and you are denied treatment that your doctor recommends due to bureaucratic red tape, […]

Times Argus The recent Times Argus headline “Shumlin eyes payroll tax hike” on the front page unfortunately tells only half the story of funding for single payer. It isn’t until the last paragraph on Page 3 of the Peter Hirschfeld article that we read about the “biggest health care premium reduction in American history” that […]

Times-Argus The headline of your Sept. 5 article states, “Shumlin to rely on payroll tax hikes” to fund single payer. However, this headline would be equally accurate if it stated, “Gov. Shumlin to implement the largest single premium decrease in U.S. history.” Indeed, as the article itself makes clear, taxes to fund a health care […]

Times-Argus Gov. Shumlin is correct to state that taxes will have to rise significantly in order to fund the new single-payer health care system. He is also correct when he states that they will replace — and not be added to — the increasingly expensive, unaffordable, confusing and unreliable private insurance premiums, copays and deductibles […]

Randolph Herald I would like to respond to the letter “High Deductibles Bring Savings” in the August 15 edition of The Herald. As someone who has suffered these plans before, I am curious for whom the savings are brought to. It is certainly not the insured. They get to pay both the premiums and the […]

Rutland Herald In her commentary “An Unhealthy Public Policy” (Rutland Herald, Aug. 21), Ms. Darcie Johnston, founder of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, an anti single-payer group, writes that “Vermonters and Vermont’s health care system will suffer if this ‘experiment’ [Vermont’s Act 48 and Vermont’s version of Obamacare] is continued and opponents alternatives are ignored.” […]

Rutland Herald I would like to respond to the letter “Let it die a quick death” (Aug. 15) where the author suggests that the Affordable Care Act will inflict “confusion and economic hardship.” Confusion, yes. Any new program will cause initial confusion until the kinks are worked out of it. Economic hardship is another matter. […]

Rutland Herald Last week I received several pages from Medicare which purported to explain benefits they were or were not covering for visits I and my wife had made to our doctor last April. Finding them difficult to understand (references to charges not covered because they were hospital, not doctor’s office procedures, when we had […]

Caledonian Record To the Editor: I chuckled at the editorial Getting it Good and Hard in the Aug. 3 edition of the Caledonian Record. The heading is beautiful, though imprecisely timed. It should have been written before the era of Green Mountain Care Board, Vermont Health Connect, and Obamacare, such as it is. Then the […]

Rutland Herald Mr. McClaughry missed the point of my letter concerning his latest commentary. Constitutional questions and semantics (tax or fine, etc.) aside, his proposal for the uninsured was similar to ACA (Obamacare) in spite of his political ideology. Both favor using of the taxing power of the IRS, in their own way, to encourage […]