Clinton’s Health Plan

In response to “Health Plan Won’t Seek Sweeping Tax,” Aug. 11:

In yet another case of the theatricality and impracticality of the Clinton Administration, it appears that 500 consultants, 1,150 groups and 1,500 meetings have been used to do nothing more than devise cutesy slogans and plan Hillary Rodham Clinton’s upcoming tour. I’m sure painstaking care has been taken to choose just the right, politically correct “citizens” to discuss their “plights” (sounds like Geraldo was one of the consultants) and to paper the house with Clinton “supporters.”

Typical of this Administration, we are again being asked to approve of a program before those in charge of developing it have figured out how it will work and who will have to pay for it. (Answers: It won’t and the taxpayers.)

The final paragraph describes the White House’s answer to taxpayers’ concerns about absorbing the cost of coverage for the unemployed by telling us that we are now paying for it at the “most expensive way possible.” Let’s not forget the truth of the matter--that the indiscriminate spending policies of the federal government make a $20 Tylenol seem like a bargain!

LAUREL ALTMAN

Van Nuys

Bill Clinton says that “it defies common sense to say that we can’t maintain the world’s finest health care system, stop all this cost shifting, bring our costs back at some competitive level, cover everybody and create jobs” (Aug. 17).

However, during the presidential campaign, Clinton judged health care systems among the different countries according to the average life expectancy and infant mortality rate. When will he realize that his criteria for a fine health care system have very little relationship to the quality of a health care system? Even if all his reform proposals are implemented, we will still have a higher infant mortality rate and shorter life expectancy than other countries simply because these statistics have much to do with lifestyle, rather than the qualify of a health care system.

JANIFER FUNG

Rancho Cucamonga

Thank you for exposing the outrageous administrative costs of the U.S. national health care system in your editorial (Aug. 6). When the total administrative expenses in the health care field will exceed $232 billion, or about one-fourth of the total health bill, it is time that a lesson be learned from our northern neighbor.

Canada spends only one-half the U.S. percentage on administrative expenses because it has the single-payer system. Unlike the United States, where the health care system chokes on the duplication, bureaucracy and price-gouging of more than 1,200 private insurance companies, Canada’s government provides comprehensive medical care through one set of guidelines and one system.

GEORGE SPIRO DIBIE

Hollywood