Rep. Pearce opposes affordable care act
Why Repeal a Law That Benefits Us?
I DON’T LIVE in U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce’s district, but his op-ed column on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) gave me reason to pay attention to his campaign.
It surprised me the many things he had to say about the act, which is the sole reason I currently have insurance. I am covered under my mother’s insurance and am very grateful for it.
My own issues aside, I did a little investigating into Pearce’s rationale to repeal the Affordable Care Act. In Pearce’s opinion, the act is “causing layoffs, suppressing job creation, forcing employers to consider dropping coverage for employees and doing economic damage to communities and job creators across New Mexico,” but I need help to understand how.
The text of the Affordable Care Act does not require any business with fewer than 50 employees to purchase insurance at all. I have shopped at, serviced and even worked for small businesses in and around the Albuquerque area, and even the most well-off of these seem to have fewer than 20 employees. I am unclear why an act that requires nothing of them and provides financial incentives to provide insurance is causing them to reduce their workforce.
I can only conclude that other factors are to blame, and I am a little offended by Pearce’s insistence that this law that helps me so much is hurting people, statements for which he provides so little real evidence from the law itself.
REN PRICE
Albuquerque
The Old Gravy Train Finally Going Away
SOMEONE COULD evaluate Rep. Steve Pearce’s op-ed column of July 20 on the Affordable Care Act in one sentence that contains the words “Christmas turkey,” but I won’t go there.
The opponents of a bill tell you a lot about it. The ones who are so adamantly opposed to the health care act are those who benefit from the status quo. The benefactors are pharmaceuticals, insurance and portions of the health care industry.
Billions are at stake, and they are not giving up without a fight. The opposition to the ACA has not come up with any facts against it or proposed any logical alternative plan. Instead they have resorted to voluminous misinformation through conservative columnists and organizations such as the Rio Grande Foundation.
The Affordable Care Act and the Massachusetts health care program are based on a Heritage Foundation Plan that called for everyone to be covered by insurance. The Massachusetts system is going about as planned, is well liked and costs are near projections.
Pearce and the vast majority of conservatives profess hatred for the individual mandate. They have always preached individual responsibility. What is so different about this? For the plan to work, everyone has to be in it. …
The old system was the most expensive in the world, the dominant reason for bankruptcies, allowed 30,000 plus per year to die and was ranked 37th by the World Health Organization. …
I agree with Pearce on one thing: I also would like for Congress to look at the facts and act accordingly.
I guess it would be too much to ask conservatives to do the same thing.
LEON LOGAN
Tucumcari
Best Solution Is Easy: Single Payer
I AM A LOCAL businessman with more than 80 employees, and I pay 100 percent health insurance coverage for my employees and half for their families. Many have been with me for decades, and I believe they are the best.
In our system we use health benefits as the opportunity to recruit and retain the best staff we can find, but insurance should not be a benefit available to only the lucky few.
One of my key employees recently had an accident at home that will leave him out of work for a year and probably permanently disabled. This is a tragedy, but without insurance it would be a catastrophe. At most other businesses like mine in Albuquerque, he would be without help and without hope.
My problem is that some of my competitors — no doubt the gang beseeching Rep. Steve Pearce to protect them from the evils of providing health care to their employees — have a cost advantage over hundreds of employers who like myself value their employees enough to incur these costs.
And health insurance premium costs, whether paid for by employers or individuals, are significantly higher than the phony tax the congressman refers to — he knows there is no such tax on families in the law.
What is needed is single-payer national health insurance paid for by all citizens and available to all citizens. The Affordable Care Act builds on our existing system — as it stands, health care coverage for employees comes from their employers or they go without. This means those of us with insurance pay real “hidden taxes” in our premiums for those who don’t have coverage but use our health system when they have emergencies.
If Pearce is reconsidering this model and has concluded he does not support employer-based insurance, will he support single-payer instead? He might even get my vote if he does.
RICK THALER
Albuquerque
Status Quo Simply Isn’t Good Enough
I’M GLAD REP. Steve Pierce concludes his opinion by stating, “Congress has the responsibility to listen to the facts …” Well, here are a few.
In the two broadest and most accepted measures of the efficacy of any given health system, longevity and infant mortality, the United States ranks 50th and 34th, respectively. This is behind all of those “socialized medicine” countries such as England and Canada, and virtually all of Europe. This is in addition to the fact that in the U.S., the per capita spending on health care delivery is 40 percent higher than in the next highest country.
Anyone who has the capability to think for her/himself could only conclude that our historic system is at best broken, and at worst a significant fraud perpetrated on the consuming public.
Pierce and his political colleagues would have done better to offer specific fixes to the prior system which was obviously out of control, or at least to have gone along with the elements — most of them — of the Affordable Care Act that they originally developed and proposed over the last 20 or so years.
DAVID PAUL BLACHER
Albuquerque
Tell a Big Lie, And Keep Repeating It
IN REP. STEVE Pearce’s op-ed column on July 20 he claims that the average U.S. family or household will pay $4,700 a year in new taxes. This type of claim is often made by Republicans as part of their script for bashing the Affordable Care Act.
This claim is absurd and fails a simple sanity check. According to the Census Bureau, as of 2010 there were 116.7 million households in the United States. At $4,700 per household, the total new tax revenue would be $548 billion per year. That would eliminate half of the OMB’s estimated $1.1 trillion deficit for 2012.
This seems to be one of those political myths that Republicans hope if repeated often enough and loudly enough, people will believe without checking. If they actually believe this often-repeated claim, it suggests an unwillingness or inability to do the type of serious budget analysis, as opposed to ideological posturing, needed to solve our budget problems. If they don’t believe it and know it is not true, then we have a different, even more serious, problem.
Later I saw Journal business reporter Win Quigley’s article on how Pearce got his $4,700.
Pearce says that since the health care mandate penalty is a tax, then all health insurance premiums are taxes and this is the average number for New Mexicans. Calling a health insurance premium (as opposed to just the mandate penalty) a tax doesn’t make it one. …
To imply that these are new taxes is highly deceptive, but I guess that has become the norm for some campaigns. … Maybe political fraud or political malpractice should be criminalized. But I guess Congress wouldn’t pass it. Keep up the good work.
OLIN BRAY
Albuquerque
Serving Overlords Blindly Since 2002
U.S. REP. Steve Pearce should be in the pretzel-making business. It’s hard to find a pretzel as twisted as the statements he made in his specious Journal op-ed article.
Let’s start with the health fees he labels a “tax.” No one who has insurance will be charged an additional dollar. His “taxes” are actually a “penalty” for anyone who can afford health insurance but refuses to buy it.
Why? Because the costs of their care when they’re sick will need to be borne by the rest of us. …
Pearce also fails to mention the Affordable Care Act allows children under 26 to remain on family policies, or that 32 million more Americans will now finally “have” health care — care the nation’s insurance companies have been denying them for years.
Some 25,000 uninsured Americans die each year. That number should dissolve to nothing. …
Bad for the 99 percent of us? I don’t think so, Mr. Pearce.
What’s bad for us are politicians like you who espouse the dishonest claims of a party that’s beholden to the 1 percent.
DAVID PAULSEN
Santa Fe
I DON’T LIVE in U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce’s district, but his op-ed column on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) gave me reason to pay attention to his campaign.
It surprised me the many things he had to say about the act, which is the sole reason I currently have insurance. I am covered under my mother’s insurance and am very grateful for it.
My own issues aside, I did a little investigating into Pearce’s rationale to repeal the Affordable Care Act. In Pearce’s opinion, the act is “causing layoffs, suppressing job creation, forcing employers to consider dropping coverage for employees and doing economic damage to communities and job creators across New Mexico,” but I need help to understand how.
The text of the Affordable Care Act does not require any business with fewer than 50 employees to purchase insurance at all. I have shopped at, serviced and even worked for small businesses in and around the Albuquerque area, and even the most well-off of these seem to have fewer than 20 employees. I am unclear why an act that requires nothing of them and provides financial incentives to provide insurance is causing them to reduce their workforce.
I can only conclude that other factors are to blame, and I am a little offended by Pearce’s insistence that this law that helps me so much is hurting people, statements for which he provides so little real evidence from the law itself.
REN PRICE
Albuquerque
The Old Gravy Train Finally Going Away
SOMEONE COULD evaluate Rep. Steve Pearce’s op-ed column of July 20 on the Affordable Care Act in one sentence that contains the words “Christmas turkey,” but I won’t go there.
The opponents of a bill tell you a lot about it. The ones who are so adamantly opposed to the health care act are those who benefit from the status quo. The benefactors are pharmaceuticals, insurance and portions of the health care industry.
Billions are at stake, and they are not giving up without a fight. The opposition to the ACA has not come up with any facts against it or proposed any logical alternative plan. Instead they have resorted to voluminous misinformation through conservative columnists and organizations such as the Rio Grande Foundation.
The Affordable Care Act and the Massachusetts health care program are based on a Heritage Foundation Plan that called for everyone to be covered by insurance. The Massachusetts system is going about as planned, is well liked and costs are near projections.
Pearce and the vast majority of conservatives profess hatred for the individual mandate. They have always preached individual responsibility. What is so different about this? For the plan to work, everyone has to be in it. …
The old system was the most expensive in the world, the dominant reason for bankruptcies, allowed 30,000 plus per year to die and was ranked 37th by the World Health Organization. …
I agree with Pearce on one thing: I also would like for Congress to look at the facts and act accordingly.
I guess it would be too much to ask conservatives to do the same thing.
LEON LOGAN
Tucumcari
Best Solution Is Easy: Single Payer
I AM A LOCAL businessman with more than 80 employees, and I pay 100 percent health insurance coverage for my employees and half for their families. Many have been with me for decades, and I believe they are the best.
In our system we use health benefits as the opportunity to recruit and retain the best staff we can find, but insurance should not be a benefit available to only the lucky few.
One of my key employees recently had an accident at home that will leave him out of work for a year and probably permanently disabled. This is a tragedy, but without insurance it would be a catastrophe. At most other businesses like mine in Albuquerque, he would be without help and without hope.
My problem is that some of my competitors — no doubt the gang beseeching Rep. Steve Pearce to protect them from the evils of providing health care to their employees — have a cost advantage over hundreds of employers who like myself value their employees enough to incur these costs.
And health insurance premium costs, whether paid for by employers or individuals, are significantly higher than the phony tax the congressman refers to — he knows there is no such tax on families in the law.
What is needed is single-payer national health insurance paid for by all citizens and available to all citizens. The Affordable Care Act builds on our existing system — as it stands, health care coverage for employees comes from their employers or they go without. This means those of us with insurance pay real “hidden taxes” in our premiums for those who don’t have coverage but use our health system when they have emergencies.
If Pearce is reconsidering this model and has concluded he does not support employer-based insurance, will he support single-payer instead? He might even get my vote if he does.
RICK THALER
Albuquerque
Status Quo Simply Isn’t Good Enough
I’M GLAD REP. Steve Pierce concludes his opinion by stating, “Congress has the responsibility to listen to the facts …” Well, here are a few.
In the two broadest and most accepted measures of the efficacy of any given health system, longevity and infant mortality, the United States ranks 50th and 34th, respectively. This is behind all of those “socialized medicine” countries such as England and Canada, and virtually all of Europe. This is in addition to the fact that in the U.S., the per capita spending on health care delivery is 40 percent higher than in the next highest country.
Anyone who has the capability to think for her/himself could only conclude that our historic system is at best broken, and at worst a significant fraud perpetrated on the consuming public.
Pierce and his political colleagues would have done better to offer specific fixes to the prior system which was obviously out of control, or at least to have gone along with the elements — most of them — of the Affordable Care Act that they originally developed and proposed over the last 20 or so years.
DAVID PAUL BLACHER
Albuquerque
Tell a Big Lie, And Keep Repeating It
IN REP. STEVE Pearce’s op-ed column on July 20 he claims that the average U.S. family or household will pay $4,700 a year in new taxes. This type of claim is often made by Republicans as part of their script for bashing the Affordable Care Act.
This claim is absurd and fails a simple sanity check. According to the Census Bureau, as of 2010 there were 116.7 million households in the United States. At $4,700 per household, the total new tax revenue would be $548 billion per year. That would eliminate half of the OMB’s estimated $1.1 trillion deficit for 2012.
This seems to be one of those political myths that Republicans hope if repeated often enough and loudly enough, people will believe without checking. If they actually believe this often-repeated claim, it suggests an unwillingness or inability to do the type of serious budget analysis, as opposed to ideological posturing, needed to solve our budget problems. If they don’t believe it and know it is not true, then we have a different, even more serious, problem.
Later I saw Journal business reporter Win Quigley’s article on how Pearce got his $4,700.
Pearce says that since the health care mandate penalty is a tax, then all health insurance premiums are taxes and this is the average number for New Mexicans. Calling a health insurance premium (as opposed to just the mandate penalty) a tax doesn’t make it one. …
To imply that these are new taxes is highly deceptive, but I guess that has become the norm for some campaigns. … Maybe political fraud or political malpractice should be criminalized. But I guess Congress wouldn’t pass it. Keep up the good work.
OLIN BRAY
Albuquerque
Serving Overlords Blindly Since 2002
U.S. REP. Steve Pearce should be in the pretzel-making business. It’s hard to find a pretzel as twisted as the statements he made in his specious Journal op-ed article.
Let’s start with the health fees he labels a “tax.” No one who has insurance will be charged an additional dollar. His “taxes” are actually a “penalty” for anyone who can afford health insurance but refuses to buy it.
Why? Because the costs of their care when they’re sick will need to be borne by the rest of us. …
Pearce also fails to mention the Affordable Care Act allows children under 26 to remain on family policies, or that 32 million more Americans will now finally “have” health care — care the nation’s insurance companies have been denying them for years.
Some 25,000 uninsured Americans die each year. That number should dissolve to nothing. …
Bad for the 99 percent of us? I don’t think so, Mr. Pearce.
What’s bad for us are politicians like you who espouse the dishonest claims of a party that’s beholden to the 1 percent.
DAVID PAULSEN
Santa Fe
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