Predicting the end game

So for the government-run VA health care system, patients will be sent to the private sector.

In addition military hospitals for decades have neither been staffed or funded to meet the needs of all of their patients and have had to rely on the private sector to fill in the gaps.

I wonder what is going to happen in a few years when the Affordable Health Care law is fully implemented and there is little or no private sector health care left?

Where will patients go then?

Kort Meyer, Orange Park


Assess the impact

Mayor Alvin Brown maintains that JEA will fork over the extra $40 million per year needed to pay down the existing Police and Fire Pension Fund debt without any rate increase.

JEA is studying this but won’t have an answer until November.

This despite the recent Times-Union article stating that it will cost JEA an estimated $100 million to comply with the newly proposed EPA rule to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

JEA did not create this pension fund debt; past mayors and previous City Councils did.

The deal the mayor is offering to JEA in exchange for these additional annual funds is to remove JEA employees from the city’s general employee pension fund, something JEA has indicated a desire to do.

This sounds like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Has an actuarial study been done to evaluate the impact on the general fund debt?

A detailed study must be made of the impact such a move will have.

Wayne Tutt, Jacksonville


Where is responsibility?

As I read in the Times-Union regarding President Barack Obama expanding a break for student debt, my blood pressure started to rise.

The first issue is that if you borrowed the money, then you, not me, should be accountable and responsible for paying the money back as originally agreed.

Secondly, the cost of this program is not known as shown by the Education Department secretary stating “We actually don’t know the costs yet.”

This is another example of this administration doing something and not having a clue as to the cost of it.

This is just like the so-called Affordable Care Act, another program that I subsidize.

Does the Democratic Party not want individuals to be accountable/responsible for their own success/debts so that they have to become dependent totally on the government for their survival?

Raymond K. (Bud) Smith, Blackshear, Ga.


Selfish and sheltered

I’m concerned that the recent tea party upset in Virginia may be a harbinger of the future.

The tea party focuses on economics and limiting government while refusing to engage in social issues.

The tea party doesn’t consider any individual needs to be the responsibility of government.

Unfortunately, young children, the elderly and those with physical and mental problems may be incapable of taking care of themselves.

How can intelligent people refuse to acknowledge the undisputable connection?

I’ve known tea party extremists for years.

I’ve always thought that their anger was because they simply didn’t understand political compromise.

Well, I was wrong.

Their problem is that they just don’t care about anyone other than themselves!

We have serious problems to solve.

We need serious people to solve them.

But whatever your particular problem is, I promise you the tea party is not the least bit interested in solving it.

They gather together a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time and talk about family and American values and character.

Then they wave a photo of the president and scream that he’s to blame.

Then they promise that the tea party will restore America.

Mark Greason, Jacksonville


Quit using euphemisms

I just read an article that referred to a politician “authoring his own version of the Dream Act to give legal status to young undocumented immigrants.”

How confusing it must be to people who are just learning the English language when they discover that the opposite of the word “legal” is not “illegal” but “undocumented.”

Except in the context of anything other than citizenship status, at which point “illegal” is indeed the opposite of “legal.”

I bring this up not to advocate on either side of immigration reform.

I have no strong feelings on that topic either way.

What I do have very strong feelings about is the use of euphemisms and politically correct speech.

It’s illogical, cowardly and dishonest.

The fact that we’re no longer able to say what we mean even when stating a simple, incontrovertible fact is preposterous and antithetical to our core principles.

Yet we tolerate it.

Shame on us.

Kevin Green, St. Augustine