Your Views for December 1

Obamacare a bust

I feel sorry for Kim Gitzel (Your Views, Nov. 17), and the millions more like her. I’m not surprised, however.

You mean we can’t keep the policies we liked? Gosh, what’s next? Can’t keep our doctors, either? You mean our annual insurance premiums won’t be reduced by $2,500? Is it possible this Abominable Care Act won’t lower the national deficit as purported? Do you think the massive beast might cost more than the mere trillion or so they first forecast? Well, it’s now estimated to be more than double, and on the way to triple. Just wait until we start subsidizing the insurance companies for the “risk corridor.” Who’d a thunk?

The ACA was supposed to be half funded from Medicare/Medicaid savings. The proponents said they’d just eliminate all the fraud and waste. If that’s so easy, we should have done it before. They said more savings were to come from reducing reimbursements to the providers. But payments to doctors and hospitals were already drastically low. Roughly one-third of physicians wouldn’t accept Medicaid patients before. What do you think additional reductions will do?

This act didn’t allow insurance to be sold across state lines; and didn’t include tort reform, nor anything that would actually lower medical costs. But anyone who points out Obama’s fallacious logic is automatically considered a racist.

This behemoth was sold to us under false pretenses. Obama and his ilk lied, bullied and bribed to squeak it through. They had to. Didn’t have one vote to spare.

By the way, remember the Louisiana Purchase? Sen. Mary Landrieu was offered an extra $200 million in Medicaid payments for her vote. Bad enough, but due to a hasty “rounding” error they drafted the provision for an extra $4.3 billion to Louisiana instead. That’s what happens when our representatives rush to pass something they don’t even read.

I’m for eliminating abuses of folks with pre-existing illnesses, and for helping the poor obtain coverage. However, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Why do we need this gargantuan takeover of one-sixth of our economy to rectify a few things? What about a program like Quest instead? What sense does it make to adversely affect nearly all of us in the attempt to help a small fraction?

The big problem isn’t a faulty website. It’s the law itself. We ain’t seen nothing yet. Rational people should have known better.

Sign it, mayor

Open letter to the mayor: As an senior citizen, mother of six and grandmother of 10, I am responsible for what I leave as a legacy to those who carry my blood. Then there are all the people I know in the community of Kohala whom I consider “family.” I have done considerable research on GMOs and believe them to be unhealthy for consumption by all two-legged and four-legged beings. However, something I learned recently seems to be one of the defining pieces to this quagmire.

How can Monsanto insist there is no danger in human and animal consumption of GMO food when their cafeterias only serve organic food?

We are writing tomorrow’s history of the Big Island. Those who force GMOs on the community, the names of those people and their families, will carry the brunt of the karma, anger and hate of everyone else whose family members become ill and die.

Do you want your name on that list? Does your family want to be on that list? Do your children and grandchildren and their grandchildren want to be on that list?

Please sign Bill 133 into law for the sake of future generations.

Unfriendly airline

Well, the holiday season is here, and many of us will be traveling to the mainland to visit relatives or just taking a trip. We have vacation time, so now is the time. Wanting to make sure we have flight reservations, we have booked our flight on Hawaiian Airlines ahead of time. After all, we want to make sure we can get a seat on the plane.

Oops, something came up. We cannot leave on the day we booked and have to move it up a day or two. So we call Hawaiian Airlines to “change” our schedule. We do this weeks in advance, so it is not a last minute “change.”

Guess what? Hawaiian Airlines fines us. Yes, we said a nasty word: “change.” So the airline will fine us $200 for wanting to “change” our reservations. They make millions of dollars in profit with the luggage fees, and now they want to make millions more with penalties if you have to make a change.

Changing a reservation is a simple matter of removing your name from one list and putting it on another. But it appears to be a way that the airlines came up for making more money and really sticking it to you, the traveler.