The reason we are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have national health care is because we don’t need it (“National health care needed,” letter, Aug. 31). If you look at the track record of socialized medicine, it stinks. Costs skyrocket and quality of care plummets. The reason quality plummets is because fewer people become doctors when they can no longer afford to pay back school loans, rent, utilities and malpractice insurance. Innovation decreases because the government won’t pay to cover the costs of all those technological advances because they “aren’t necessary.”

All you have to do is look at survival rates of different diseases between the U.S. and England. A man who has prostate cancer in the U.S. has a nearly 100 percent survival rate over a five-year period while the same person only has a 75 percent survival rate over the same five years in England.

If you want to bring down health care costs:

Put a cap on medical malpractice settlements. This will help keep doctors’ costs down.

Allow people to buy medical insurance outside of their own state. By opening up to outside states, you automatically create more competition and bring down costs.

Forcing health care reform down our throats is not a solution, it is anti-American. Why are we going to force 82 percent of Americans who have health insurance to give up what they have in order to cover the 18 percent who don’t have insurance? It is not the government’s job to provide health care for everyone. It does not have the constitutional authority to do any such thing. It’s time for our government to reread the Constitution and figure out that it does not run the country. We, the people, do.

Staff Sgt. Al MeyerRamstein Air Base, Germany

Migrated