Sounding Off:

Health care has been pretty much front and center in the Daily Pilot mailbag lately with the present system taking a pummeling, (“New health-care plan is needed,” June 14; “More thoughts on health care,” June 10 and “Affordable health care is needed,” June 10).

Then, on July 17, the breaking news article reads “Crowd protests Obama’s health-care plan.”

The majority in the referenced letters tends to favor a government takeover of health care, euphemistically referred to as the “public option.” “Public option” is a misnomer because there will eventually be no insurance “option” other than the government-mandated plan.

Obama claims that if you like your plan, you can keep it. Not true. Private insurance, unable to compete with the government plan, will go away. The gargantuan, 1,000-page bill just unveiled provides that no one will be able to purchase new private health insurance, effective the same year the bill goes into effect. If you lose your plan, or decide to enroll in a different plan, you will legally be prevented from doing so. So much for private plans or the ability to choose. Embedded in this proposed legislation is a new federal health board whose job is to decide whether your health care is “effective” or “appropriate.”

The president and Congress want to impose this heinous plan on us, but they will be exempt from it, keeping their stellar taxpayer-funded benefits plan. If the government plan is good enough for us, it should be good enough for them.

Obama was asked if he would be willing to pledge that he wouldn’t seek extraordinary care not provided by the government plan for Michelle or his daughters if they became sick, and the public plan he is proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make that pledge. He did say that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.”

Can you say “hypocrisy”? Isn’t “the very best care” what we all want?

I find it astounding that anyone would want to place government bureaucrats between his/her doctor and him/herself — government centered care as opposed to patient-centered care. When was the last time the government demonstrated its ability to run something as important as health care?

Medicare, rife with waste and fraud, is out of money, and Social Security is in trouble. Young workers are paying into a system from which they have little chance of benefiting. Have you taken a good look at veteran’s health care and the backlog of veterans seeking benefits?

I think that we can all agree that if millions of Americans are unable to afford health care insurance, the country is experiencing a crisis that calls for health-care reform. But if some bureaucrat in Washington is calling the shots with regard to your health care, or if you have to wait weeks or months for needed tests or treatment, that is a crisis of monumental magnitude. That is precisely what has happened in other countries with a government takeover; decisions are made for patients, not by mutual consent between patient and doctor, but by mandate of the government.

Americans are altruistic. We don’t relish seeing our fellow citizens suffering the prospect of unaffordable, needed health insurance. We need to find a way to solve this crisis that is affordable, not rife with waste and fraud, meets the needs of patients, and allows patients, in concert with their doctors, to arrive at what diagnostic tests are needed and which course of treatment best serves the patient.

A government takeover is not that way.

ILA JOHNSON lives in Costa Mesa.