Letters to the editor

Matthew, have you fallen to the right side of that eponymous “Middle?” In your recent Jan. 16 piece, “Progressive Fantasies,” perhaps you are responding to Jim Hightower’s famous observation, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road except a yellow line and dead armadillos.” That’s the conclusion one must draw from your time-honored, right-wing complaint about people just wanting “free stuff.”

I can speak only peripherally about homelessness — that a huge number of them are consigned to cars and tents because of medical debt imposed by our broken, mismanaged health care non-system, a system that fattens only corporate wallets. Were these unfortunates just wanting “free stuff?”

What’s to be said of a nation where almost a third of the population is without health insurance or underinsured, subject to such high premiums and deductibles they cannot afford medical help — where millions go bankrupt, homeless and die because of barriers to care? Such a nation is crippled and unproductive.

And to that I can speak directly: The solution lies in a guaranteed, universal health care program that is publicly endowed and privately delivered, where a government trust fund pays for all medical needs without taking profit and with minimal overhead. This is how our traditional Medicare works, that we all pay into. Improving and extending it to all residents would end a lot of homelessness.

No one expects a free lunch. We just want the money, we all pay in taxes for health care does not end up being funneled to Wall Street.

— Patty Harvey, Willow Creek