Re "Can Obama recover on healthcare?" Opinion, Aug. 2
I am confident that President Obama will discover moral imperatives for creating new entitlements, even if he misses Doyle McManus' latest column. Unfortunately, too many of his predecessors had the same idea, and the price of their collective generosity is becoming clear.
With Medicare predicted to go insolvent in 2017, the president must explain how he plans to save government healthcare. We know he wants to add millions of new beneficiaries and make the rich pay more. If that's a revenue-neutral proposition, he has yet to convince either the Congressional Budget Office or the public. His cost-cutting proposals haven't helped; they sound as nebulous as his campaign slogans and promise to be as quickly forgotten.
Michael Smith
Cynthiana, Ky.
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While it is critically important to seniors and their physicians that healthcare reform legislation repeal the broken Medicare payment formula that threatens seniors' access to care, it is only one of the reasons the American Medical Assn. supports the House bill, contrary to what McManus writes.
