Thank you Congressman for the phone town hall meeting you just held. Unfortunately, there was not enough time for my voice to be heard.
I am very much for health care reform. For many of us, a job with health insurance can be a more important factor than salary.
I work part-time as a speech pathologist in one of the local school districts. Reimbursements for speech therapy services in the schools comes from state and federal monies. The result of that is that I have an overwhelming amount of paperwork. The burden of the paperwork is so huge that and time consuming that it takes the place of my being able to see children more often. I often say that I see the children in order to do the paperwork. And to be perfectly honest, much of the paperwork is nonsense. When it comes right down to it, I am being paid to do clerical work for government bureaucrats rather than helping the students for whom I was hired. This leads me to my biggest concern with universal health care—paperwork. Will the doctors be burdened by so much paperwork that the patient will take second place to it? Will the government hire an army of bureaucrats to police the doctors? If so, universal health care will indeed be far more expensive than it will need to be.
One more thing. Abortion should be treated like any other medical issue and should not be subject to government regulation. Once health care does not cover for one procedure because of someone’s beliefs, then it leaves itself open to noncoverage for many medical procedures that may not be to one or another’s liking.