* Dartmouth's President Kim and the Health-Care Dog-Paddle

Editor
The Valley News
(not published)


I appreciate Mr. Allen Hood’s thoughtful response to my question to President Kim about Health Care. Apparently my phrase “the realm of the Divine” has muddied the waters. Let me try to clear them a bit: Perhaps a better phrase would have been “People shouldn’t play God”. That’s what I am afraid Dr. Kim is advocating.

By the way, the tremendously competent human beings who saved my life at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, could not have done so if my health insurance hadn’t paid for tests that indicated my life needed saving in the first place.

Instead I would simply have been a quietly ticking time bomb, waiting for kidney cancer to spread to my bones without any symptoms until it was too late.


I agree in a way with Mr. Hood that we should all sink or swim together with identical health care coverage: But I’m afraid what Dr. Kim and other health care experts are saying is that those of us who are swimming now, should be reduced to dog-paddling so that those who aren’t swimming at all can dog-paddle too.

I want everyone to be RAISED to my level of health coverage. I don’t want everyone to be LOWERED to a reduced coverage so that universal coverage can be achieved. Reduction is what Dr. Kim and Mr. Obama are proposing, I fear.

The real problem is this: Politicians are too cowardly to raise taxes so everyone can have the excellent health care coverage which I have.

Instead they want to reduce my health care coverage and give everyone else the same reduced coverage so they don’t have to raise taxes.

But they want to do something else in their cowardly avoidance of raising taxes which is certain to poison the well. They want to cut doctors’ pay by changing the fee structure incentive system.

Have you ever worked in a system where employees were disgruntled? I wouldn’t want a disgruntled surgeon cutting out my cancerous tumor. I want my doctors happy, wealthy, and fulfilled, if you please, Dr. Kim.


Raise my taxes any day of the week.


Sincerely,


Paul D. Keane