Dear Senator Cornyn

Senator John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Cornyn:

The health care system in the U.S. is a mess. It is too expensive, too inefficient, and leaves too many without health care. The cost is due to greedy drug companies, greedy insurance companies, and, let’s face it, greedy doctors.

Every country in Western Europe has better health care at lower cost than we do. How? All of those countries have national health programs, which vary slightly from country to country, but all of them have a form of “socialized medicine” which work better than the system we have.

Our fear of “socialized medicine” is a result of propaganda by the AMA. When England adopted its national health plan shortly after World War II, the “doctors’ union” put ads in all the newspapers warning that “socialized medicine” was a step towards communism like Soviet Russia. That was a lie then, and it is a lie now. European nations provide health care for all their people and also have healthy, democratic political systems.

When my husband and I lived in England for six weeks in 1991, I sprained my ankle. The doctor came to the house, examined my ankle and suggested I go to the hospital for an x-ray to be sure it was not broken. At the emergency room, I waited about ten minutes before taken to have my ankle x-rayed. Cost to me for the doctor’s call and emergency room treatment was nothing.

In Garland, I had a pain in my lower abdomen. After I had a good bowel movement and the pain did not go away, I went to the doctor. She assured me it was not a strangulated hernia but sent me to the emergency room for an MRI. I waited in the emergency room at Baylor Garland for six hours before seeing a doctor. The doctor billed $198.73 for the office visit, and the emergency room charges were $6,119.58! And the diagnosis was that I was constipated! Which was not true – as I had a good bowel movement again, as soon as I got home!

From personal experience, I found the British system much better than ours in the U.S. When is the public going to wake up and demand a national system that works? Of course, Congress will have to stop listening to lobbyists and bring costs down by cutting payments to drug companies, insurance companies, hospitals, suppliers of medical supplies and equipment (another place I know over-pricing from personal experience), and yes, to doctors, too.