Eviscerating health care Not funny, Schneider

I watched Sen. Ron Johnson discuss his health care evisceration bill, offering talking points left over from Gov. Scott Walker.

More meaningful was an earlier report that Senate Republicans decided to make another try to ram through this overwhelmingly unpopular repeal (which nobody involved in health care supports) because their financial supporters demanded it.

This reminds me of a story my late mother told me about the Great Depression. When she was about 5 or 6 years old, she said her father had fallen behind on rent. She never forgot how the landlord came to their apartment demanding payment, in a thick German accent. “Ve are your owners,” the landlord reminder her father.

In this interview, Johnson refused to say whether people would lose health care coverage under his plan, breezily remarking that “there are no guarantees.”

Well, if Johnson gets the tax bill he wants, it is guaranteed that the Koch brothers, Diane Hendricks, Dick Uihlein and other suffering billionaires will come out ahead. After all, they are his owners.

While I sometimes enjoy Christian Schneider’s humor, there was nothing even remotely amusing about his Sep. 20 column regarding the state of public education in Wisconsin (“Evers has a problem with discipline”).

His blatant misrepresentations of the effects that Act 10 has had on public education were incomprehensible and unconscionable. I have multiple family and friends in the public school sector both as students and as educators, and I can personally attest to the high level of professionalism and dedication our teachers demonstrate. They work hard for lousy pay in an environment of escalating expectations and diminished safety and dwindling benefits.

Schneider seems to indicate that since the passage of Act 10, scads of incompetent or dangerous educators have been fired by a collectively emboldened public school system. In the many school districts I am very familiar with, I have yet to hear of one teacher fired, much less many of them.

Instead, what I hear is the frequent lament that yet another quality educator has left the field to go to a more rewarding, less stressful, more profitable profession. College enrollment in educational majors has plummeted. Districts are having to try harder than ever to fill open positions.

Act 10 has indeed resulted in removing teachers from our classrooms, but this is not evidence that it is a success. It’s the greatest sign of what an abysmal failure it truly is.

Jen Sohr Grafton