Pros and cons provide a very stark contrast

What a wonderful juxtaposition of headlines in The Sunday Record on Aug. 26 ("Is Canada's remedy right?")

The "pro" side found single-payer, universal health care "fair." The "con" side found it "heartless and uncaring."

Sally Pipes, the "con" writer, is an employee of a so-called think tank sponsored by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. I heard her speak a couple of years ago in San Francisco. Her non-arguments were the same then.

Her primary objection seems to be based on an injustice to her relatives. In reality in this country, the uninsured and underinsured have no consistent access to health care. This insurance-controlled determination of who gets access to health care seems to fit the description of "heartless and uncaring."

Pipes' arguments that medications aren't available in the Canadian system ignore the situation in our industry-controlled environment.

If prescribed medication isn't on your insurance formulary, you pay out of pocket or go without (assuming you're insured and have access at all).

Allowing a profit-driven system - generally based on drug costs - to decide what medications are covered seems "heartless and uncaring."

Opposition to single-payer health care access has no real stance. A single-payer system for Californians is certainly a "fair" start in caring for our communities.

Carol L. Bailey
Stockton

Definitions are critical

In an Aug. 26 column in The Record, Margee Ensign asked how it's possible that, in the richest country in the world, our infant mortality rate is going up, and how 40 countries, including Cuba, do better.

I have an answer. The World Health Organization's definition of a live birth, also accepted by the United Nations and the National Center for Health Statistics, is:

"The complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a product of conception, irrespective of the duration of the pregnancy, which after such separation, breathes or shows any other evidence of life such as heartbeat, umbilical cord pulsation, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, whether the umbilical cord has been cut or the placenta is attached."

In reviewing neonatal deaths at San Joaquin General Hospital, almost every death unrelated to a lethal congenital anomaly is related to severe prematurity - to an extent that, in most countries, would be considered pre-viable.

I doubt if what amounts to a miscarriage - at 21 weeks in a sugar cane field in Cuba, say - would be recorded as a live birth, even if the fetal-infant had a heart beat for a few minutes after being born.

By law, such a baby should be reported as a live birth in our country.

Published studies have concluded infant mortality - based on live-birth definitions - is under-reported in all countries, but probably least so in the United States.

I'm not trying to defend our nation's health care policies. But in assessing any complex system, methods of data gathering must be central in all honest, accurate assessments.

Jeffrey Lindenberg
Director of newborn services
San Joaquin General Hospital
Stockton

Bill is bad for business

Even though health insurance is too expensive for many small businesses and their employees, the California Legislature's solution is to tell employers to do it anyway.

Instead of trying to make insurance more affordable by reducing costs, Assembly Bill 8 would require all business owners who can't afford to purchase health insurance to start doing so or pay the state a 7.5 percent health care tax.

As if that will solve the problem.

Worse, the bill would give unelected bureaucrats the right to raise this tax whenever necessary.

You can bet the tax would go up, because this new program won't have enough money to keep up with growing expenses.

This health care tax is called a fee so members can pass it with a simple partisan majority and avoid our Constitution's requirement of a two-thirds vote to increase taxes.

This legislation doesn't solve our health care problem or share responsibility. It's neither legal nor responsible public policy.

California legislators need to help make health insurance more affordable instead of just raising taxes.

Earl Wilson
Linden

The status quo remains

As a registered nurse on the front lines of the health care debate, I find our pay-for-service system outdated and immoral.

When a system excludes 47 million people, it needs to be abolished.

For too long in this country, health care has been a privilege of those who have - instead of a right for everyone.

The passage of Assembly Bill 8 will do little, if anything, to change the status quo.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez, D-Los Angeles, should be ashamed of this, because it would continue to allow the fleecing of working people as it lines the pockets of insurance companies and hospital corporations.

Our Founding Fathers would be appalled at the way we've broken our social contract. We must not continue to profit from the sick and infirm.

They're most in need, and we can't turn our backs on them. Single-payer health care is the only way to achieve health care for all.

Jeff Kramer
Stockton