Utility hurts working people
I understand Hawaiian Electric wants to move use away from the 5-9 p.m. peak hours to level out demand for electricity.
But, most people work during the day, and evening is when they cook, clean and want to be cool after a hot day. Doing laundry after 9 p.m., as the illustration in the ad in the paper shows, leaves one drying and folding laundry after 10 p.m..
Thus, working people are hit with higher prices for electricity in the evening and inconvenienced to try to avoid the higher prices.
Before we shift and save, other solutions (more wind and solar farms with battery storage maybe, or more subsidies for rooftop solar) should be tried or we are just driving more working folks off the island with higher electricity costs during the hours they must use it.
Stanley Chraminski
Kailua-Kona
Health care access should be a right
Health care is a topic frequently discussed among citizens of the United States. However, more must be done to ensure affordable health.
People who can’t afford health care are often put aside by society, such as people of low income who need health care assistance and can’t afford it.
Millions of people cannot afford health care or are not granted easy access. The U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world today, so there is no excuse for any citizen not to have affordable health care.
Some may think it’s not that bad. Yes it is, if you spend the night at a hospital. The bed alone would cost $13,600 — the average cost of health care insurance for an individual would be around $7,911 per year.
In comparison, coverage of a family would be $22,463 a year. The cost does depend on your age, where you live and what kind of coverage you choose. You must also consider that people still have to pay out of pocket, because insurance companies don’t cover all expenses. Most jobs offer health care insurance, but health care costs are still rising.
Language and cultural differences can also affect access to health care. People from different backgrounds, especially those who don’t speak English, are often misunderstood, which affects the quality of care they receive. You can see how this could be frustrating for all societies in America except for the wealthiest of societies.
Although our society’s health care isn’t the best, there have been attempts to improve it, such as the Affordable Care Act made in 2010, just after the 2008 recession. However, to put an end to this problem, health care should be a right instead of a privilege.
Cole Cooper
Hilo
‘Dismanagement’ of U.S. Postal Service
One would not ordinarily connect the American political circus with mail delivery, but once Donald “the aspiring dictator” Trump gave U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy the job of “dismanaging” the U.S. Postal Service, it has become our unfortunate reality.
In case you aren’t familiar with the term “dismanagement,” I just now coined the term. Mismanagement describes inept management, but dismanagement describes a deliberate mismanagement.
This all began with the myth of massive voter fraud that Trump associates with voting by mail.
Other than a few isolated instances where someone tried to vote for a dead relative, there has been no evidence of massive voter fraud, other than the accusation of massive voter fraud. When asked to produce evidence of massive voter fraud, the accusers ether become silent or yell, scream and shout things about meaningless drivel, a specialty of theirs.
One repercussion of this mail delay is you may have to order your meds a month or two in advance, because you mighty find yourself on life support by the time it arrives.
DeJoy owns a lot of stock in a private delivery company, which was why Trump picked DeJoy to destroy the USPS, other than his being a big contributor to the Trump campaign.
He has incentive to do the damage and tell the American public the USPS should be privatized as a result of “their” mismanagement, all the while hoping you know nothing about his dismanagement.
Dave Kisor
Pahoa