Health care

Insurance agencies’ same ol’ tricks

The health insurance lobby has been warning us for decades that government-run health care would raise costs, ration care and put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.

For-profit health insurance has brought all that and worse. The corporate business model is to maximize profits by raising prices, cutting quality and finding ways to deny coverage. People pay high premiums under the mistaken belief they are covered and realize too late that insurance companies have myriad ways to renege. Instead of a bureaucrat between you and your doctor, it’s an insurance executive whose bonus depends on finding ways to deny coverage to those who need it most.

To preserve its soaring profits, the insurance industry is deluging us with the same old scare tactics. Their nationwide strategy includes placing local letters to editors, hiring syndicated columnists to spread their propaganda and flooding the Internet with misleading horror stories scripted by their paid professionals.

Worst of all, they’ve flooded Congress with campaign contributions. Typically, those working the hardest to sidetrack health care reform or block efforts to create a real public option are the ones who have taken the most money from the health insurance lobby.

GENE BULLOCK

Poulsbo

Town hall meeting

A shame Inslee missed it

Our Representative Jay Inslee is not a representative at all; he has a great lack of courage by not facing his constituents at a face-to-face town hall meeting because he knows we do not want the terrible health care bill being proposed. He too must know it is wrong or he would come out from behind the telephone. And his telephone town hall is not quite going to cut it with us. How dare he do such a thing.

MARY G. TAYLOR

Seabeck