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Arizona is bleeding; don’t delay the cure
Note to Arizona Republican legislators: The patient is in the emergency room bleeding profusely.
Now is not the time to argue about the cost of transfusions, sutures and bandages.
Gerald S. Mayer
Phoenix
Closer look at uninsured needed
President Obama’s budget states that “the number of uninsured in America . . . now totals 45.7 million” (“Fed budget debt to quadruple in 2009,” Feb. 27). This number warrants clarification.
A full 12 million Americans without insurance already are eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program or Medicaid. They just haven’t signed up.
Another 14 million make more than $50,000 each year. According to the Census Bureau, another 10 million aren’t even American citizens. And thanks to the legislation that the president signed in early February, an addition 4.1 million Americans will be eligible for SCHIP by 2013.
Expanding access to health insurance is important. But for effective reform, we must understand who lacks it.
Peter Pitts
president
Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (www.cmpi.org)
former associate commissioner, Food and Drug Administration
New York, N.Y.
Obama to keep knifing economy in back
President Obama’s speech reveals that he plans to harm the economy in numerous ways: tax increases backed by envious soak-the-productive rhetoric, increased regulations, direct and indirect politicization of lending practices by banks (the main cause of our current economic troubles), hundreds of billions of dollars more in corporate welfare and pork, boondoggles into uneconomic energy methods, and perhaps worst of all, socialist healthcare.
I am selling a significant portion of my remaining stock market holdings, as it’s clearer than ever that Obama and the Democrats will continue to knife the economy in the back. So my capital is going on strike.
With the stock market down by about 23 percent since our empty suit of a president was elected, it’s clear that my capital isn’t alone. As author Ayn Rand commented about times such as this in which government tyranny increases, “Be as unreassured as you have the wits to be.”
Mark Kalinowski
New York, N.Y.
Obama economy fix boon for migrants
The way President Obama and the Democrats have passed his plan to save or create jobs in the United States by concentrating on infrastructure (rebuilding bridges, paving highways, etc.) should certainly increase employment for illegal immigrants and encourage more to come in.
Daniel Younger
Itasca, Texas
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