American healthcare needs to be rethought

Re “Treatment Plan for Healthcare Will Be Self-Help,” Feb. 1

President Bush, in his State of the Union speech, only briefly discussed America’s healthcare crisis.

While healthcare costs rise, the president continues to propose drastic cuts to such key public health programs as Medicaid and Medicare.The only policy that the president pushed in his speech was health savings accounts, another idea borrowed from the insurance companies. These accounts only reduce costs for those who are healthy and wealthy; they do nothing to address the issues of access, quality or coverage.

We taxpayers, who provide for the president’s healthcare, believe that he owes the American people a solution that will provide all Americans accessible and affordable quality healthcare today.

MICHAEL A. STRAETER

President, United Food

and Commercial Workers

Local 1442, El Segundo

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As a physician, I have extensive working knowledge of our medical system. I was shocked at Bush’s simplistic notion that the major problems facing our system today are to be handled by reforming malpractice insurance and by “savings accounts” that would give more choice.

Americans are drowning in too many choices that they are too ill-equipped and too uninformed to make. Medical care is not a system that lends itself to capitalist business models of competition and profits. It needs to be rethought in a serious manner before plans are proposed. There are people who have been trying to do this for many years but cannot be heard over the loud voice of the insurance industry and other profiteers.

MYRA FEFFER

Los Angeles