AFCM Letter to the New York Times

³In his column "Ailing Health Care" (April 11) Paul Krugman calls on
your readers to "get ideology out of the way" as the key to better
health care.

The specific ideological barriers to which he refers
include "competition and personal choice." His argument is beautiful
in its simplicity: In order to have better health care we just need
to eliminate "personal choice."

The Founding Fathers called that "freedom."

It is rare to find an advocate of government power being so explicit
about what he wants to destroy in order to establish that power. For
anyone who values individual liberty, the discussion should stop
there.

I cannot resist pointing out, however, that condemning the private
sector as "bloated and bureaucratic" and praising government agencies
as "lean and efficient" is obvious nonsense, even though the private
sector is hardly free of many government imposed burdens including
contending with 130,000 pages of Medicare regulations.

Such fatuous statements from someone who wants to dispense
with "personal choice" can only be based on one thing. Just what is
your ideology Mr. Krugman?

Richard E. Ralston
Executive Director
Americans for Free Choice in Medicine
Newport Beach, California
www.afcm.org