Letter Of The Day

Even I could write a better column about health care than David Yepsen offered us on Dec 11.

Yepsen erected a straw man called "socialized medicine," then began stabbing it with his ink pen. The result was merely confusing because no one is proposing socialized medicine — where all doctors work for the government — as a solution to runaway health-care expenses.

I would begin my column by typing "Google.com" into my computer. There I could quickly find the 2004 Harvard study that found we could all save money by booting the thousands of tangled health-insurance plans we now endure and adopting a single plan that covers us all. That takes government action, to be sure, but it is not socialized medicine. And it has nothing to do with Italy or FEMA or any of the other inkblots that bled from Yepsen's straw man.

—Jerry Depew, Laurens.
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