Dear editor:
Dr. Jack Sternberg has the right to defend his radical "tea party" position, though most of it I find distasteful, especially the idea of privatizing Social Security and Medicare. (Those of us who worked for years and paid into the program as an investment deserve to inherit from the many deposits we made.) Dr. Jack should not, however, make misleading and false statements in his defense.
For example, when he states "Obamacare was rolled out and passed without any input from any group." That simply is not factual. The matter of the ACA going through Congress started in 2009, although the seeds of the program had been sown in the early 1990s and eventually those seeds took hold in the state of Massachusetts and adopted there, including the individual mandate, which goes back to the conservative think tank named Heritage Foundation, an idea supported then and for a long time by well-known Republicans, like Newt Gingrich, Orin Hatch and Charles Grassley. The debates beginning in 2009, beginning with the bill Affordable Health Care for America ACT, H.R. 3962 (House) and then moving to the Senate took several months. Space here does not permit a complete demonstration of the wrangling that went on between Democrats and Republicans in both houses. To cut to the chase, a bill was eventually passed in the House on Nov. 7, 2009. That bill was passed on to the Senate and eventually passed with a different name and signed by the president on June 25, 2010. For Dr. Jack to state there was no input from any group defies the facts, all of which can be found under ACA on the Internet.
As to the immigration problem, it appears the "tea party" portion of the Republicans in the House and Senate will not make any concessions, judging by the bills they put through the House on Aug. 1, bills that will not pass the Senate, bills that they know will help them look better, even though they know will not go into law. This leaves President Obama with the difficult decision of another executive order, in this case to broaden the already-existing directive Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, temporarily shielding young immigrants from deportation and allowing them to get a work permit. Expanding this directive will obviously garner more accusations of over-reaching, although Leon Rodriguez, new director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, says the president has the legal authority to do so.
It is ironic that what started as a Republican idea suddenly in 2010 became one considered unpatriotic and unthinkable by even those Republicans who had supported it originally. Strange world, this world of politics. What will the rest of 2014 bring?
John W. "Doc" Crawford
Hot Springs
Editorial on 08/27/2014