Windsor@Weill
EDITOR: Thank you to everyone – the students who performed, the music teachers who prepared and directed the students, the attentive audience, the volunteers, the supportive parents, Tricia Harrison for program design, Accent Printing for program production, and, of course, the Green Music Center staff. It was a terrific opportunity and we are very grateful to have had this world-class performance experience.
Joella Olsen
Windsor Advocates for Music
Care
EDITOR: As a local physician, I am deeply disappointed in our current administration’s efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The ACA allowed 20 to 30 million Americans to obtain health insurance, including healthy people unable to afford it previously as well as those with pre-existing illness who were essentially excluded from the commercial insurance market. As a physician for nearly 30 years, I have been gratified to witness the declining numbers of people postponing needed healthcare until it is too late.
The newly proposed healthcare legislation is estimated to cause 14 million individuals to lose their health insurance over the next year with another 10 million following in the next decade. This will undoubtedly result in at least thousands of unnecessary deaths, at a conservative estimate. As physicians, the majority of us view health care as a basic and fundamental right for all our people and thus many major groups have announced their opposition to the repeal of the ACA, including the American Medical Association and the largest internists’ and family practice physicians’ groups.
In California, we fortunately have very active health care provider groups, including physicians and nurses who have been gradually developing the concept of a single payer system similar to Medicare to cover all Californians. Medicare is a remarkably effective and efficient system and allows seniors and the disabled to receive high-quality healthcare.
This spring, our state legislature will be considering this legislation, SB 562. I will be encouraging its passage so that we will join the ranks of the other nations of the world in compassionately providing healthcare for all.
I hope you will join us in urging our state legislators to allow California to continue to lead the way towards a more just and humane society.
Niranjana Parthasarathi, MD
Alexander Valley Healthcare
