Mailbag:

Your Wednesday Daily Pilot front page shockingly promotes lies put out by the same people who “swift-boated” John Kerry (“Locals decry health plan”).

Everything that shows on the signs held by those otherwise presumably intelligent people are fabrications put out by the extreme right of the Republican Party that will do anything, no matter how underhanded, to gain support.

Health care in the U.S. is the most expensive and least effective of any major country in the world. About half of our citizens simply cannot afford regular health-care insurance.

The inference that Obama would do anything to cause the deaths of the elderly is absurd, while the current system does just that by not providing any real support for those who cannot afford the private, for-profit, system.

Social Security and Medicare are successful government programs that we would all be much worse off without. Such programs are not to be feared as some kind of rapid slide into “Communism.”

Jerry Parks

Newport Beach

Real problems are with private care, not Medicare

It must be that none of the people shown protesting public health care insurance on the cover of your Wednesday issue have ever had to deal with a life-threatening disease.

We had the sad job of caring for a 72-year-old relative who recently succumbed to terminal cancer. If there can be any bright spot in such a situation, it was the efficient, compassionate service we received from Medicare . . . a public medical insurance plan (perish the thought!). Medicare paid all bills promptly, filtered out the double-billing and other “mistakes” made by the various medical professionals and hospitals, and answered all our questions and concerns in a prompt, professional manner. Medicare simply works.

Contrast this with the shoddy treatment we got from our relative’s large, well-known long-term care and Medigap insurance company.

They stalled us, stonewalled us, bullied us and plain ignored us for as long as they could to avoid paying out claims that we were due. It took six months of phone calls, letters, e-mails and personal office visits to pry one week of long-term care benefits out of this insurance company that had been collecting $400-a-month premiums from our relative for the last 20 years.

Now that’s what I call health-care rationing. The insurance companies are masters of the game (are you reading this, Megan Barth?). It’s high time the insurance companies had real competition, and the U.S. government is the only entity big enough to offer that competition. I applaud Loretta Sanchez and others in Congress and the executive branch who are at least trying to fix a system that, left unchecked, will bankrupt us and leave us dead.

Jon and Patricia Rowe

Costa Mesa