Senate GOP health care bill

Re: “Hick signs letter opposing GOP health care bill,” June 17 news story.

Hats off to Gov. John Hickenlooper and six other governors who asked Senate leaders to take a sensible approach toward the reform of Affordable Care Act.

U.S. health care costs have soared to $3.2 trillion a year and consume an ever larger share of family budgets. The governors’ letter, signed by members of both parties, called for a bipartisan effort to achieve the obvious goals for health care legislation, namely to control health care costs and stabilize the market. Instead, Republicans have chosen to gut Medicaid, coverage for the poor, disabled and elderly, so that they can provide tax cuts for the wealthy.

This legislation will have a significant longterm impact on every citizen in this country. Yet the Republican leadership in the Senate has chosen to craft the bill behind closed doors, behavior that reveals a purely political goal and one that will prove devastating to ordinary Americans. Charlene Willey, Westminster

In 2010, Mitch McConnell complained that Democrats, who had spent months crafting a health care bill and accepted input from the GOP and medical experts, were hurriedly “jamming this massive health spending bill through Congress.” Yet, today, we have Republicans working in great haste on a bill that 13 senators are creating — a bill with little outside input that’s so secret they haven’t even shared it with their fellow GOP senators.

As a nurse, I am appalled by the idea that these men are writing this bill without hearings from health care providers or health systems analysts. That’s like 13 guys without a cookbook trying to make meatballs out of spaghetti.

Health care is not a fast-food restaurant. It is a right for every man, woman and child. The American people don’t want a fast health care bill; they want a meaningful, affordable health care bill. Laraine Carmichael Nelson, Estes Park