Letters

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 […]

Burlington Free Press Thanks much to Aki Soga for his editorial “A Worthy Experiment” (July 20) where he discusses “Vermont’s ambitious efforts to reform the health insurance system.” The word “ambitious” is interesting here. The rest of the democratic/technological world has for decades had such health systems in place which Vermont is now striving so […]

Rutland Herald Regarding your recent editorial on the alarmingly high cost of childbirth in the United States as compared to other industrialized countries, a few more observations can be added about the continuing high cost of health care in the United States that these childbirth costs exemplify. First, most other countries put their hospitals on […]

Valley News To the Editor: Regarding your editorial on end-of-life care and the findings of the Dartmouth Atlas, (“End-of-Life Care and Costs,” June 18) a few observations are in order about the continuing high cost of health care. Some people blame overutilization, and by extension blame fee-for-service by saying that it encourages physicians to order […]