Letters to the editor

Editor,

There goes Peter Hayden (in the Oct. 3 edition of the Daily Journal Letters to the Editor) with his” fuzzy math.” Eighty percent times 1,100 respondents in favor of a Charter school equals 880. This is hardly a "majority of the residents of Foster City” as we have 30,000+ residents as of the last census.

Harry W. Tong

Foster City

Healthcare mindset

Dear Editor,

I applaud Barbara LaRaia’s informative comments in her "guest perspective,” published in the Sept. 28 issue of the Daily Journal "Invest tax dollars wisely: In public health care,” and agree that the human infrastructure needs bolstering, particularly if half of all California bankruptcies are due to medical bills, as she states. While the movie "Sicko,” to its credit (not mentioned in the guest perspective), advanced the flurry of discussion about providing Universal Healthcare, the alliance of the movie’s creator, Michael Moore, and the California Nurses Association, have unfortunately increased the ranks of those public health care opponents with that "mindset” that LaRaia refers to.

Quite simply, for them, when it comes to Universal Healthcare, if it’s free, government-run, and Michael Moore supports it, it can’t be good. The public needs to separate out the "Us verses Them” issues, and support the basic concepts of Universal Healthcare, regardless of who the proponents are. Because we are the government, as she mentions, and we are funding healthcare with our tax dollars (not free), it is us who must determine not whether they are "eligible,” be they citizen, guest worker, or indigent, but how to equitably make the system inclusive of everyone, as at least the state of Massachusetts has already done. Imposing fees, like the per visit co-pay and the yearly deductible, as basic requirements, would be a start. Voting in the best proposal in the statewide election, after studying everything thoroughly, would be the next move.

David Heran

San Bruno

Keep clean, keep lives

Editor,

With all the discussion of the cost and quality of U.S. health care, one simple thing that can be done immediately to save money and lives is to make sure that all healthcare workers adhere to strict hygiene standards — which means that they wash their hands (not 50 percent of the time as is currently the case, but 100 percent of the time). Hospital infections kill 100,000 people each year, and two million people suffer needless infections.

Proper hand washing isn’t optional, it’s a matter of life and death. Until we are able to totally revamp our national health care system, this is one simple thing that we can do for ourselves and our loved ones — make our hospitals clean now.

Eve Visconti

Foster City

Editor’s note: Visconti is the Daily Journal film reviewer.

Compassion for

abortion mothers

Editor,

This is in response to Lynne Santa Maria’s recent letter, Catholic and American. Lynne Santa Maria stated that Ross Foti told her that he never went to college, so she said he is an unqualified teacher of anything and a poor example of a person of faith. Lynne, what about Jesus and John the Baptist, the apostle? Did they have a college education?

Lynne Santa Maria then states that she used to be pro-life and she too, as pro-life, lacked compassion for a woman who has to have an abortion. Lynne, it is difficult for me to believe you were once pro-life, because if you were truly pro-life, you would have compassion for the mother as well as for the baby. The mother’s life is also in danger. Many women have lose their lives during an abortion or shortly there after in so called safe abortion clinics. If you were really pro-life, you would offer the mother help. Such as medical and housing. If the mother has had an abortion you would offer her counseling- all this free for her. And then you would pray she would not put her life in danger as well as her baby’s life.

The Supreme Court of the United States also had legalized slavery.

Jeanette Garibaldi

Redwood City

Microchipping humans

Editor,

It has been interesting to read the letters concerning the use of microchips in humans. There are places that they could prove very useful such as identifying people suffering from dementia who have a tendency to wander, joggers who are injured and are carrying no identification, infants who might be stolen from hospitals, and figuring out who an unidentified body might be. It is my understanding that the 2000 or so microchips that have been implanted in humans are basically the same as the microchips we have been implanting in animals for several years. And, as a veterinarian of years experience with microchips, it is not quite as simple as your readers seem to feel. First, the microchips are a bit bigger than an eyelash. They are about the size of a piece of steamed rice. So they require a needle about the size of the needle used when you donate blood. Second, the chips contain no patient information at all. They cannot be programmed with this information. They simply allow a scanner specific for that type of microchip to yield an encoded ID number. Then the particular company that stores the data for that type of chip must be contacted to get the information on that patient. While the amount of time needed for that information is there for the lost person or animal, it probably wouldn’t be practical for things like financial information or trying to make sure that a new employee is a legal resident. As time goes on, it may be that the technology will improve so that information could be stored in the chips. But even then, financial and medical information can change every day. How could each chip be updated with new information?

Don Conkling

San Bruno

Cater to those who

speak the language

Editor,

I want to state that I am in total agreement with Keith Kreitman’s column "I can speak American,” published in the Sept. 29-30 issue of the Daily Journal, and if he were running for the position of president of the United States, I would vote for him just on this one issue alone.

Thank you for printing his letter. Corporate America and our government has to stop catering to those who do not want to speak the language of the country that they are living in. It is a shame!

Aileen Thompson

Foster City