Trump’s strategy is nothing new

Many Americans have never seen or heard of anything like Donald Trump before. While Trump’s gambit for continuing power is new to America, it’s as old as the hills in history.

His is an attempt to set up a different form of government without actually modifying our current Constitution. Former President Trump wants a type of government where the chief executive has much more power than is traditional or legal in America. Turns out, there is a large and willing base of support for his actions today.

Our own Bible chronicles a story about a popular wave of support for a new form of government in ancient Israel. Samuel, the ethical leader of Israel’s consensual government party, was overwhelmed by calls for a king. Israel’s first king, Saul, was a power-hungry, jealous figure who occasionally wanted to deal with his political rivals by disappearing them.

This is the way democracies go, especially when they lose track of what freedom actually entails. Athens went this way when she abandoned democracy and supported Alexander the Great. Rome went this way when she cheered Julius Caesar as he marched into the city and changed its government forever.

Is America ready to go this way today? Life is much easier under autocracy. Just chow down on beer and pizza ’til the day you die. I’m considering it. How about you?

KIMBALL SHINKOSKEY, Woods Cross, Utah

VA shows pitfalls of government health care

Proposals to nationalize U.S. health care — like Senator Bernie Sanders’s bill to establish Medicare for All, which he reintroduced in May — are bad news.

Every six months, the VA’s Inspector General submits a report to Congress on the agency’s performance. And every six months, the story is the same: gross incompetence, fraud, long wait times and substandard care.

The OIG’s most recent report, which covered October 2021 to March 2022, identified more than $4 billion in “monetary impact” — waste, questionable spending, fraud and the like. Investigations into offending behavior led to more than 100 arrests for crimes that included wire fraud and bribery. One Louisiana doctor had received more than $650,000 in kickbacks from a medical supply company.

But while the waste and criminality are galling, the patient stories are worse. A veteran who sought treatment and eventually died at a VA center in New Mexico waited 175 days for a CT scan for possible lung cancer, according to the OIG. Then, even though the results showed signs of cancer, the patient did not receive a follow-up biopsy. The patient eventually received a conclusive cancer diagnosis at a non-VA hospital.

The OIG also reported on a patient who died 17 days after being discharged from a VA medical center in Gainesville, Fla., after a 33-day hospital stay. The Inspector General concluded that the facility “failed to develop a discharge plan that adequately ensured patient safety and continuity of care.”

Even patients not in imminent danger face the stress of extremely long waits. At the VA clinic in Anaheim, Calif., at the beginning of June, new patients could expect to wait 29 days for an appointment. At the three clinics in Jacksonville, Fla., the average wait in early June was 52 days. And at one clinic in Fayetteville, N.C., earlier this month, it was 96 days.

None of this should be especially surprising. Long waits and sloppy care characterize single-payer health care all over the world.

Canadians face a median wait of more than 25 weeks for treatment from a specialist following referral by their general practitioner, according to the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank. Such delays have serious consequences. SecondStreet.org, another Canadian think tank, found that over 11,500 Canadian patients died while waiting for surgeries, procedures or diagnostic scans between 2020 and 2021.

Canada and the VA offer a glimpse of the subpar treatment, needless suffering, and rampant fraud and abuse we can expect under Medicare for All.

SALLY C. PIPES, Pacific Research Institute

Student debt and assault vehicles

Back in the day, in the 1970s, student debt was quite small, paid off by most people quite quickly, and my (Boomer) generation stepped into home ownership that way. Once you own, your equity can usually be leveraged to get you into your next home, but if you rent while you drain your paycheck every month to a student loan payment, that down payment usually remains just an elusive goal. Meanwhile, Republicans and a couple Democrats in the Senate blocked all tries for a significant student debt forgiveness portion of various bills. Where, they ask, is the money coming from? The student debt held now is on the order of $1.75 trillion, an enormous amount.

I have a couple of suggestions.

Get rid of the useless and grotesquely expensive U.S. Marine/Navy amphibious assault vehicles, proven more lethal to U.S. servicemembers than to anyone else. Last week, the Department of Defense added some $87,999,656 to the bloated $1,910,796,347 contract, which is, naturally, “cost-plus” — that is, whenever the DoD feels like adding to it, they do, often convinced by war profiteering corporations to do so.

Dial back on the eye-rolling number of brand-new military aircraft that cost us U.S. taxpayers (including many student debt-holders) such unfathomable amounts each year. Earlier this month, the DoD awarded yet another massive contract to Lockheed for more of them, some $7,630,940,571 in new money added to existing contracts.

These are just single contracts. Each day, many more contracts send billions to war profiteers, while U.S. students are treated substantially worse than any and all students in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. There is plenty of money for student debt relief in the U.S. — or there could be, if our priorities shifted a bit away from enriching weaponeers and instead doing a better job of caring for our own young people.

It is only a matter of electing representatives and senators who will do this. We should be in dialog with them, and they should know our feelings, whatever those feelings may be.

DR. TOM H. HASTINGS, PeaceVoice