Letter of the Day: Krauthammer's Rx

Krauthammer's Rx

EDITOR: While columnist Charles Krauthammer seems intent on trashing the conditions surrounding the private insurance market ("A full-scale federal takeover of health care," Sautrday), he advances no alternatives, nor does he provide readers with any ideas as to how to remedy the situation.

I realize that the world of punditry allows for misrepresentations, half-truths and outright lies. Add to that the convenient notion that accountability on the pundit's part is never required and we're left to filter facts as we know them through the prism of discordant, partisan ideology.

Krauthammer's perceived pain over the terms by which free-market interests have fallen prey to government sanction is ambiguous at best — deceitful at its worst. It's a pretty well-known fact that insurance companies hardly ever end up on the short side of the ledger.

So it looks to me as if these free marketeers, who consider themselves to be the smartest guys in any room they may be in, will continue to hurl epithets from the sidelines while the rest of us attempt to (however feebly) press ahead in trying to see that all of our fellow citizens have an equal opportunity to access life-sustaining health care in a marketplace where profit margins are not the compelling interest.

GARY KASTERNAKIS

Petaluma