U.S. already has single-payer care

After a presentation to the Otsego County Board of Representatives on single-payer health care recently, Representative Fournier was quoted in The Daily Star as referring to single-payer as socialized medicine or even communism. I forgive Mr. Fournier’s not knowing much about the history of health care in America, and I decided to respond.

In 1798, President John Adams signed into law a bill creating the U.S. Public Health Service to provide health care to merchant seamen. This program, still in existence, is a single-payer program that is paid for by funds allocated by Congress. I have never heard it referred to as socialized medicine, but it could be.

About the time of World War I, the U.S. government began a program for veterans of that war, the great VA medical program that has served many millions of American veterans from many wars. It is a single-payer program financed by our government through the taxes we pay. My father was treated in a VA hospital after World War I, and my brother in Vermont is a veteran who gets his health care at a VA facility. He is a Republican and he doesn’t call his medical care socialized medicine. He is not a communist, and neither was my father.

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid, two more great health-care programs that have had enormous impact on the health of the American people. Both are single-payer health-care programs because the U.S. government pays for them with money legislated by Congress.

Are these single-party-payer programs socialized medicine or communism? I think most people really don’t care, but our country still has more than 40 million people without any health-care coverage. Shouldn’t they have health-care coverage, Mr. Fournier?

Charles J. Hudson
Cooperstown

The U.S. and U.K. for decades have been colonial powers in the Near East. Since the vast oil resources there are vital to both economies, both countries have repeatedly intervened in the Near East for the political control that will ensure access to oil.

Our president would like you to believe that we are in Iraq to do good, while the real mission is to create another country under our control, as is the case in Saudi Arabia.

We do not have a clean record in the Near East. In 1944, President Roosevelt declared to the British: "Persian (Iranian) oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabia, it is ours."

And it remains "ours," which may explain why 15 of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi Arabians.

In 1953, our CIA investigated a coup in Iran to oust the democratically elected Mossadeq. Why? He had been nationalizing the Iranian oil industry, but if he succeeded, other oil-rich countries would follow.

Our colonialism, resource exploitation and cultural intrusions in the Near East have generated today’s terrorism and activated age-old, trivial internecine conflict in the Near East.

I do not condone terrorism any more than I condone our wars in the Near East.

However, terrorism is a strategy of the weak against the strong. Bush insists terrorism is simply free-floating evil by people envious of the U.S. This is deliberate deception, but is in line with Bush’s refusal to ask why 9/11 occurred.

We will not be free of terrorism until the U.S. adopts new Near Eastern operational policies characterized by justice, equity, respect for cultural difference, equal support of Palestinians and Israel, and open purchase of oil.

Samuel Wilcox
Cooperstown

Reading the column written by Clarence Page in the June 14 issue concerning Paris Hilton, I was completely with him. Every sentence was exactly right. Every thought was exactly as it should be. And then he hit the "black card" with his words, "... legendary perquisites that many black people believe only rich white people know about?" I don’t understand why he had to add such a comment.

Whether we are black, white, green or blue, it has nothing to do with Paris Hilton, but for some reason he has to turn his words into something else.

Black Naomi got her due, and white Boy George got his. Dopey Paris Hilton, I agree, should have gotten hers.

Jacqueline Brotschul
Cooperstown