Excellent Examiner editorial / my letter in SF Weekly

A couple items published during the past couple months which I came across somewhat after the fact...

  On January 11, the Examiner had a terrific editorial (p. 16) attacking "universal" (government-run) health care, by way of examining the state of Massachusetts (http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/Universal_health_coverage_Look_to_Bay_State_first.html). That state's mandatory insurance law, championed by governor Mitt Romney (a Republican!) and passed in 2006, promised that "every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance." has dismally failed to meet that lofty goal.

  However, the editorial writers inform us: "Just a year after the universal-coverage law passed, The New York Times reported, state insurers were already jacking up rates to twice the national average." Overall costs of the program are 85 percent higher than original projections, yet "Massachusetts officials reluctantly admitted that, despite increased enrollment, the state is still far from universal coverage," and "in the state with the highest physician-to-patient ratio in the nation, some people now have to wait more than a year for a simple physical exam." Why? Because payments to health care providers were slashed in order to cover the program's ballooning costs, and "many doctors and dentists in Massachusetts began refusing to take on new patients."

  As today Washington D.C. has an imposing monument honoring the "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier," so perhaps some future libertarian capital will have a monument acknowledging the steadfast, reliable Unintended Consequence.

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  And in the February 25 edition of SF Weekly, I was surprised to find published as a letter to the editor on page 6 (although without mentioning my position with the LP), a comment which I'd posted to the paper's website in response to Matt Smith's terrific column about empire-building by the head of the Rec & Park Department's rangers (http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-02-25/news/sf-weekly-letters). In fact, three out of four of the letters published in that issue were taken from web comments, and there aren't a huge number of such comments posted to the SF Weekly site. All the more incentive to be sure to visit SFWeekly.com and comment on their stories, as one would appear to stand a good chance of being published in print as well. Someone from the SF Weekly had in fact sent me an email expressing their interest in publishing my comment and requesting my full name and location, but I inadvertently overlooked the message until after the paper came out, which did not stop them from running it in the meantime. Of course this was fine by me -- any political comment I make on a newspaper's website I am more than happy to see published as an LTE, and let them know that in the future they were welcome to publish in print any such comments of mine without requesting permission.)

Love & Liberty,
        ((( starchild )))