PUBLIC VIEWPOINT Truer View Of Health Care

I am writing to challenge Mr. Grisham’s assertions (“The long view of health care,” Oct. 10) and to inform readers of some of the rest of the story.

After denouncing Goldwater, Reagan and Bush, Mr. Grisham states: “I write as a Christian pastor.” In fact he has written as a political activist, omitting many important facts such as those concerning health insurance.

Truman proposed a national health insurance program in 1947. This was the response of the left’s opposition to public health insurance, which was the free-market response to Rossevelt’s cap on wages, which forced companies to offer this perk to retain workers who would otherwise move from company to company to get higher initial wages. Politicians have overly controlled/restricted this industry, thus leading to most of the problems which would/could have been corrected in a free market through competition.

Reagan made his first political speech in 1961 at the request of the American Medical Association and it was in opposition to socialized medicine.

Before Reagan said the words that Grisham quoted (you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free), he said, “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine” and “the advocates of (socialized medicine) when you try to oppose it challenge you on an emotional basis.”

Grisham states: “I follow Jesus Christ, whose most characteristic vocation was healing.” However, his Bible shows that Jesus healed a small number of people while he fed hundreds. Jesus healed 10 lepers but did not heal the rest of the lepers.

Grisham states: “I’ve mostly talked about economics and efficiencies of health care,” then suggests that the reader Googlea website (which claims 27 daily page views) that supports his views. The readers, before they vote, should Google socialized medicine in Great Britain and Canada and learn how it has failed.

There are problems with all manmade systems and there always will be, but if government socialism could fix these problems, why not take it to the extreme and have a governmentimposed religion? With enough socialism, we could fix it such that there are no poor people, proving wrong that man who said, “The poor you will always have with you.”

Welcome to America, Mr.

Grisham. The people who formed this unique country, with its checks and balances, did so to escape socialism, to form a republic and to have freedom and liberty, if I may use the words of Mr. Reagan, Mr. Franklin, Mr.

Adams and Mr. Jefferson.

R. STEWART TICE

Fayetteville