Health care, Fred Phelps reborn, streetcar history

So, the young don’t need health care? Let’s see, what about pregnancy and childbirth and possible complications resulting from them?

What about sporting and auto accidents, asthma, autism, drug overdoses or addiction? What about emotional issues or pap smears and mammograms?

What about severe flu cases, obesity and food poisoning?

Are young adults immune to cancer or brain tumors, dog bites, nutrition issues and gunshot wounds in schools, at workplaces or on streets?

The list goes on. I’m pushing 70, and I swear I’m healthier than many of our young adults who by nature take risks or live lifestyles that are destructive.

Please stop parroting the GOP’s limitless reasons to deny or dissuade young people from recognizing the necessity of health care (Obamacare) to everyone.

Spreading the risk to all ages of the populace is not a new idea. It is and has always been the underlying basis of premium pricing. That’s what actuarial studies are all about.

If you don’t believe it, talk to pediatricians and other doctors, including those in the emergency room.

Rep. Lance Kinzer, I want my Republican Party back please. The big tent that President Ronald Reagan built, you and your like have shredded.

To hide behind your Bible and openly discriminate against another human is pathetic.

I loved the GOP and believed in it for less government, lower taxes and more freedom. It welcomed all and believed we could and should work together to get things done. It did not use religion as a club to beat people away from the door to our tent.

Please get out of the way so we can take back our party.

I recently signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and discovered there are 16 insurance plans in Kansas that are in the marketplace.

This means they have to play by the rules of the law (can’t dump you if you pay your premiums and can’t disqualify you for pre-existing conditions, etc.)

The private insurance companies benefit because they have a chance to collect premiums from millions of people in our nation who are otherwise uninsured. That’s a pretty neat way of expanding market share.

The sad thing is I told another adult about how happy I am to be insured and asked whether he wanted the phone number. He looked extremely fearful and said, “No.”

He said the government makes you disclose all of your assets.

I told him, no, it doesn’t. The government requires you to disclose your estimated income for 2014 and your Social Security number.

The thing this poor guy doesn’t understand (thanks to people like the Koch brothers) is that if he gets sick or injured and runs up a big hospital bill, it will be the hospital (a corporation) that can obtain a judgment against him and conduct a debtor’s exam and require him to disclose his assets, which it can then levy for payment.

He’s got it exactly backward.

Some like the Koch brothers have poisoned the well so badly that people look terror-stricken at the Affordable Care Act even though the real bogeyman is going to be the creditor corporations, not the federal government.

I, like my fellow humans, didn’t get too upset by the death of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka (3-21, A1, “Westboro’s Fred Phelps

dies at 84”). But because I think a lot about things, I began to imagine what Fred’s soul did when it met God.

I was surprised because God looked at Fred’s hateful, dried up soul and began to bathe it in love, never giving it a chance to become hateful and judgmental again. Then God decided to give Fred another chance at life, hoping God’s love might give Fred a different perspective.

And he put Fred’s soul into a beautiful baby looked upon by adoring parents, thinking he or she was indeed the most special baby that ever lived.

Then God made this baby gay.

Will you be more like Fred or more like God in the treatment of this new soul? Can we be capable of an all-encompassing love that knows no boundaries?

The Star needed to do more research regarding the March 26 editorial “Streetcar moves on without Brookside.”

According to the NextRail KC website, streetcar ridership peaked in 1922 just about the time Brookside was being developed.

It also states that between 1917 and the 1930s, streetcar line abandonments occurred.

In 1927, the system was considered overbuilt, and no new lines were built.

Over the years, the streetcar lines were operated by franchises that all went bankrupt, including the last streetcar that ceased operation in 1957 on the Country Club right of way.

We took a survey in December of all 1,057 homes in Armour Hills, and of the responses received the result was 4-to-1 against the streetcar using the Trolley Trail.

This is more than the “minority” that The Star likes to mention.

The city has not properly explained why a streetcar is needed in this area and more importantly the cost/financing and who actually benefits.

The city is still operating under the build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy.

There are much bigger issues to resolve and spend our money on.

I just happened to see an ad by Americans for Prosperity claiming that Kathleen Sebelius, as governor of Kansas, blocked alternative energy production leading to 15 increases in electric rates.

So far, the only blocked energy production I can find is the Holcomb fired plant.

Gov. Sebelius did criticize energy from “clean coal.” Anyone who has ever been around a coal mine or a coal-fired power plant is not going to refer to the fuel as clean.

Electric rates have gone up regardless of fuel.

Surely the ad, supporting our illustrious Gov. Sam Brownback, wouldn’t mislead?

The day President Barack Obama was elected, some terrible people whom we also elected and some other people who live here couldn’t stand having a black president.

Every day, they come out with another lie about Obama.

We all know these Republicans in Congress, including those in the tea party, have said “no” to the president’s policies again and again.

How many times has Obama pleaded with them to pass a jobs bill?

It could put thousands of people back to work. We have bridges that are falling apart. It could be any of our children or grandchildren or us on one of those bridges when it collapses.

These Republicans have done nothing to help our country. The average person has little value to them.

Cuts in food stamps, no minimum-wage increase — they love to keep people in poverty and care only about the multimillionaires and billionaires.

Let’s send them home to stay so they never darken the halls of Congress again.

President Obama, with all the lies and terrible things the Republicans have said about him, has more brains in his little finger than all of the members of Congress put together.

I see right wingers are again dutifully following the marching orders issued by their talk radio, cable and online bloviators: Blast President Barack Obama on Crimea.

And to make it really hurt, use the word “feckless.”

So these parrots, who a month ago had never heard the word before, are flooding the media with it.

Unfortunately, they never suggest what a Republican president, presumably full of feck, would do.

Launch missiles on Moscow? Shock and awe Sevastopol?

Because the Republican default strategy for any issue related to President Obama is to obstruct, complain and vilify, the party’s trained parrots have no solutions to propose either.

This story was originally published March 29, 2014 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Health care, Fred Phelps reborn, streetcar history."