Health care reform without heavy hand

In the past three days 18 letters have been published praising David Price for his vote for the House version of the Healthcare Reform Bill without one critical viewpoint. Presumably none of these writers has read the bill. It is also doubtful that David Price has read it or fully understood it if he did.

The Democrats are trying to force this legislation on our citizenry of whom a majority oppose the public option and other provisions which limit our constitutional freedoms contained in this ambiguous and complicated monstrosity of a bill. Most of us know the government cannot run anything economically or effectively.

Health care reform can be provided at a fraction of the cost of this bill by introducing tort reform and nationwide access to health insurance as proposed by the Republicans. We should all contact our senators to include these options in their bill without the public option and the other repressive and unconstitutional provisions.

The government should not force anyone to buy health insurance if they don't want it but they would be well advised to at least have catastrophic coverage. Nor should the government be allowed to divert $400 billion from the soon to be bankrupt Medicare Fund to their program.

Despite liberal claims to the contrary, conservatives do want health care coverage for all who truly need it but without the heavy hand of government.

J. E. MCCAFFREY

Durham

Still untrained?

Why is it that when I enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1955 and went through infantry training for eight weeks, it was then sufficient to go to war, or to learn another specialty during an additional eight weeks, such as serving in a 155 Howitzer Artillery Battery, the Combat Engineers or in the Signal Corps -- totaling only 16 weeks of training.

It has been six years or 300-plus weeks for the Iraqis and eight years or 400-plus weeks for the Afghans, but both apparently are not close to being sufficiently "trained'' to secure their own countries. WHY? They already have billions of U.S. taxpayer's money and massive amounts of U.S. weaponry, plus coalition firepower, including many thousands of troops, providing much blood and misery -- plus their own corruption, fraud and opium profits. This all needs to stop and soon.

Now, how about in the eight weeks, before the holidays, airlift most of the combat troops back to the U.S.? And in exchange, use the return flights to airlift those experienced trainers and other appropriate personnel to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Combat troops are trained to protect and fight, not do public relations, not establish constitutional governments, not play politics with the population or rebuild their countries.

BOB NOVAK

Durham

Scott commended

I wanted to let you know that I enjoyed the article I came across today written by Paul Scott, "The World is a Ghetto: Economic Apocalypse Now." [The article appeared only on the Web site, heraldsun.net.]

It is refreshing to read something out of the norm far as the other biased articles in the papers and to get a genuine opinion in an article and I shall inform my associates and friends to now visit The Herald-Sun site as I did in the past before the new look to the site.

DAMON HARRIS

Morrisville