Death panels debunked

To the editor:

So Nat Hentoff (published in the Opinion page Nov. 16) is a “nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.” That’s good, because his article shows that the senior fellow at the Cato Institute appears to know very little about the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Hentoff prefers the term meant to scare the uninformed: “Obamacare.”

It seems that Hentoff is fixated on federal bureaucrats and committees who will decide “how many of us will go on living.”

To wit: U.S. government death panels. Never mind that the existence of these “death panels” have been debunked time after time (listen up, Sarah) by independent fact checking organizations.

Hentoff also worries that faceless bureaucrats will wedge themselves between you and your doctor. Well, those of us with health care insurance already have a faceless bureaucrat between ourselves and our doctors. It’s a bureaucrat who works for the insurance company and whose job it is to make sure his employer makes a profit, even if it means not covering a so-called “pre-existing condition” — and even if it means dumping us as clients.

The ACA was passed to prevent health insurance companies from doing that. If fully implemented, it will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and make it possible for another 30 million-plus Americans to be insured. Since about one-fifth of the people who live here in the Valley and who are reading this letter don’t have, and cannot get, any health insurance, this can only be a good thing.

That is, Hentoff’s death panels to the contrary notwithstanding.

Bill Siedler

Wasilla