Letter to the Editor: The Stench of Duplicity

Health care for a country’s citizens is a right and a given. All industrialized nations in the world long ago recognized the need and adopted it. Health care plans in other nations provide for fully paid medical and hospitalization costs by a single payer (government) and include elder care, along with disability pensions.

In America providing health care for our people is a swamp of the most foulest politics ever to divide our nation. The stakes are high and the lobbyist money to defeat the Affordable Care Act [ACA] is a Niagara Falls of long green flooding the halls of our nation’s capitol. Since the inception of ACA, our Republican Congress has been fighting hard to repeal it and replace it with Trump Care. The House of Representative’s first attempt to scuttle ACA never made it to a vote. Congressmen, like Wisconsin’s very own Mike Gallagher, plied us with fork-tongue speak, which led us to believe he was against repeal or change. The second version of Trump Care was worse than the first, yet Mike voted for it with a resounding YEA.

Whatever the reasons for Mike’s flip-flop, it did not surprise me. On this issue, all Republican Congressionals are a band of equivocators. Along with professing one thing while doing another, the lack of spine and fortitude is very apparent as Mike sequesters himself in Washington, afraid to face his constituents at home in open forum.

Also of no surprise was a report in the June 8 USA Today which put America in third place – right behind Chile and Portugal – with the greatest disparity in the world between health care for the rich and poor. Of the poorest third of American’s surveyed, 38.2 percent reported “fair or poor health” compared to just 12.3 percent of the richest third.

You waltzed through the garden, Mike, but we’re not smelling roses, only the stench of duplicity.

Ed Hodges

Washington Island, Wis.