By RICHARD NEBELLos Alamos
This is a response to Mr. Tyler Taylor’s recent letter to the editor (link). First of all, all I want from the State of New Mexico is for them to leave my health care alone. If you want to make your plan voluntary, that’s fine. Most of the people in this community have pretty good health care coverage. I doubt that your plan would be an improvement for them.
Secondly, obviously it’s the State of New Mexico that brought us the DMV. The only difference is that with your Health Care Plan you’re going to have the State of New Mexico administer it through a new commission. Do you seriously think that you can administer health care without bringing in a whole new layer of bureaucracy? I doubt that New Mexico is competent to do that.
As for the Medicare aspects, Pete Sheehey stated in the Post that “the plan would be funded by a combination of public and private dollars, which are pooled into one fund. Funding sources include federal and state monies spent on health care (Medicaid and Medicare, for example).” That raises a lot of red flags.
Pete goes on to say that “this would not replace Medicare. Medicare would not be taken over by the NM Plan”. I’ve known Pete for a long time (he was a summer student of mine many years ago and I’m a campaign contributor) and I take him at his word on that. However, I worry about what this plan will look like when it comes out of the political process.
In his earlier Post piece Mr. Taylor stated that we are going to receive huge savings in health care costs. Obamacare was supposed to do that, too. The reality was that a lot of people lost their healthcare and costs went through the roof. I think these arguments of reduced costs through “bulk prices” are likely specious. If a federal program can’t do that, what makes you think that a state-run program can?
As to the “ideological huffing”, I’ll leave that to Mr. Taylor. What Mr. Taylor should remember is that when you do things on a state-wide basis, it’s a lot harder to force people to comply than it is with a federal program. Your program is going to have a lot of loopholes in it.
