I read Jeff Burgar’s editorial [The story never ends, March 29, South Peace News] about health care here and in the USA with interest, as I always do.

On most issues I agree with him, but on the one that I am sure he just threw in there without much thought, I disagree with him.

That was the statement that it is natural for people to want to make more money. No, like many things, we are conditioned to it. The ‘never enough’ concept of loads and loads of junk.

We all want to be comfortable in our finances. It would be unwise not to. But the desire for the kind of wealth that many are aspiring to is beyond all imaginable meaning of the word.

Burger estimates that Obamacare will collapse under its own weight, others say it won’t. If it does, it will likely be because it tries to be all things to all people and still leave their private insurance companies room to work. This seems to result in a hybrid system where Obamacare gets all the really sick people and gets dinged big bucks by everybody who didn’t want it in the first place. They set it up that way.

Should we try a two-tier system? I would say no, just having seen what privatization has done in other sectors.

People like to argue that it will become more efficient. Not from what I have seen. A new layer of pencil pushers go to work, a CEO and shareholders want their cut and everybody figures out how to get their cut.

Burgar is right about new and more expensive treatments. Every time they come up with something new it is bright, shiny and expensive.

Trump was going to get tough on drug companies in the States for their price gouging. That lasted until they closed the door on the meeting, then he crumpled like a toilet paper doll hit with the garden hose.

How much is paid for these new drugs and treatments is one place to save big, and to have a look at the amount of good they are doing, if they are doing any at all.

There was a drug that was supposed to treat Duchene Muscular Dystrophy. Not only was it hideously expensive, there were very definite assertions that it didn’t work.

Then there is the misbehaviour that goes on behind the scenes where the “it’s natural to be a greedy quack pig” allows people who work in an atmosphere of extreme trust gleefully squeeze every penny out of the system they can without even trying to live up to the old creed: First do no harm.

This is where we have to decide who we are as a nation and stick to our principles. Someone in the commentary believes that we will not be invaded. Well, she is right. If someone wants to invade Canada, they could have Ottawa and our lives would not be that different.

But if half the rumours coming out of Washington are true, Vladimir Putin didn’t have to invade America with help from Trump. He bought it – cheap.

The conservatives in the USA bitterly resent any form of social programs, they are bringing back for-profit prisons where people are put in solitary if they don’t want to do unpaid work. Many of these people are not convicted of a crime and a person not in prison would be paid to do it. That kind of takes away the incentive to cut these guys loose.

They are gearing up for war, and it came out that Michael Flynn was plotting with the Turkish government to kidnap a man with a green card and give him to Turkey, while he was with Trump.

We have to stand our ground on these matters. Health care is a basic human right, and all the foolishness that the powers that be indulge in trying to make it ‘cheaper’ without dealing with any of the systemic corruptions that are spiraling the costs out of control just isn’t going to work.
Eva Sartorius,
High Prairie