Readers on health insurance, opioids, prayer

Public option needed to save our freedom

Re: the city of Dayton’s new policy to not employ tobacco users: Employers are heavily burdened with providing health insurance to attract and retain employees. The need to cut costs as much as possible is expected through unproven workplace wellness programs, pushing more costs in higher premiums and high deductibles to employees, and now hiring based on smoking and nicotine use status.

It starts with smoking and slips easily into hiring based on body mass index, diabetes, history of cancer, etc. Where does the employer’s control over hiring based on health end? It ends when Ohioans take back what should have always been ours: A health insurance plan that is solely owned and accountable to the public, not your employer.

There are many names for this type of plan — single payer, Medicare for All, Universal Healthcare — but it all comes down to the basic freedom of having healthcare insurance coverage from birth until death that can be used at any doctor, hospital or other health care provider in your state or the entire country. Health care that is still delivered in private offices and facilities.

The freedom of health insurance that will be there regardless of where you work, or if you are going back to school, or starting your own business that much of the rest of the world enjoys is obtainable. We will only get it when we decide to take ownership of our health insurance and kick the employer out of our personal choices. KATHERINE LAMBES, M.D.,

The opioid crisis hasn’t gone away yet

Lest we forget, we still have a major public health crisis on our hands. We are still seeing people die in Montgomery County at a rate of about one a day, over the course of a year.

Addicted individuals have always walked among us. We see them in our families, our friends neighbors, co-workers and strangers.

They have always suffered and died early. So what’s changed? They are dying younger and with great frequency. This is intolerable and completely out of hand.

Perhaps we have reached a level of acceptance that says 200 or 300 opiate overdose deaths a year in our county is reasonable. We don’t really want to talk about it, think about it.

Oh, but let one person die from the Zika virus, and all hell breaks loose. A serious action-oriented response is launched. I don’t get it. I’ve known bright, creative, ambitious, beautiful young people who died in their 20s or 30s from an opiate overdose. They were all from good families, better schools, had bright futures. Hundreds every year in our county, thousands in our state.

Our response is not proportionate to the magnitude of this crisis. Let’s quit pretending we are actually on top of this. We have a long way to go and a lot of work to do. JOHN BALDASARE, DAYTON

Let’s remember the power of uplift

After seeing our wonderful Daytonian Tony Hall’s “Local Voice” column recently, it reminds me that we need uplifting programs that teach honesty, helping others, and prayer, talking with God. If people, especially young people, would have more uplifting programs, it would be better for everyone. They need to see the big picture. Prayer and meditation brings our thoughts to our most forward, most developed lobes of our brain, which will calm us down and help us to be kinder and keep us realize that life is sometimes, even often, hard, but we should do the best we can for ourselves and others. CHRISTINE DULL, UNION