This page was last updated on December 9, 2010.
First, do no harm with Medicare; Velma Berger; Beaver County Times; December 9, 2010.
From February 2005 through October 2007, Ms. Berger had a series of at least 26 Bush and Iraqi-bashing letters. In one letter, Ms. Berger told us she was proud of John Murtha. In another letter, Ms. Berger actually claimed she had “a clock ticking down to Bush’s last day in office” and that she “carr[ies] it on [her] purse everywhere [she] go[es].”
Far more often than not, the letters were war-related and ended with something like “Bring our troops home now.” For some reason we could speculate about, there were no war-related letters from November 2007 until early 2009. Ms. Berger’s four letters in 2008 were about the election campaign, with one letter supporting Hillary Clinton and another expressing her displeasure with Barack Obama. In one of the 2008 letters, Ms. Berger claimed she was upset with the Democrat party and claimed she would “now be a proud independent.” In my critique of that letter I wrote, “Though Ms. Berger asserts she ‘will now be a proud independent,’ her body of work indicates she will continue to support the leftist candidate, whoever that is. Come November after her short-term anger has subsided, I believe it’s safe to say Ms. Berger will cast her vote for Mr. Obama.” While I can’t say for sure Ms. Berger voted for Mr. Obama, a post-election letter shows Ms. Berger supports him now. That said, in “Obama can’t be compared to FDR” (7/24/09), Ms. Berger gave us a fairy tale about St. FDR and of Mr. Obama she wrote, “Meanwhile, the whole Obama family has been on a European tour.”
Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.
“Medicare is preparing to ask doctors to accept a 23 percent cut in reimbursement.
“If this bill goes into effect, two-thirds of the doctors will stop taking Medicare patients. This means you may have to see different doctors.”
[RWC] This is all old news. Why didn’t Ms. Berger complain before Obamacare’s passage, not after?
“I wrote a letter to the editor in 2002 concerning doctors leaving because of malpractice insurance in Pennsylvania.
“My orthopedic surgeon took early retirement. He said we would have enough doctors but they would not be of the quality we now have.
“These are two different topics, but the question is whether you will be able to have your choice of doctors.
“When I was younger, only the more affluent had health care. After Medicare was created in the 1960s, I remember my 75-year-old mother-in-law opening her mail and looking at her Medicare card. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever had health care,’ she said.”
[RWC] “When [Ms. Berger] was younger, only the more affluent had health care?” Hogwash! My grandparents died in their 70s and 80s in the 1940s and 1960s, were nowhere near “affluent” (My grandfathers were “unskilled” laborers.), and all “had health care.”
“After the overhaul Medicare, we probably won’t recognize it.”
[RWC] Again, why didn’t Ms. Berger complain before Obamacare’s passage, not after? Hint: Check out the ideology expressed in Ms. Berger’s letter-writing body of work.
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